Searching for neutrino emission from hard X-ray sources with IceCube

Marcos Santander

Published 2019-08-13Version 1

The IceCube neutrino observatory, a cubic-kilometer particle detector at the South Pole, first announced the discovery of an astrophysical flux of high-energy neutrinos in the TeV-PeV range in 2013, followed in 2017 by the detection of a high-energy neutrino event in temporal and directional correlation with the flaring gamma-ray blazar TXS 0506+056. This observation, combined with archival neutrino detections in 2014-2015, has provided compelling evidence for the detection of the first high-energy astrophysical neutrino source. A promising way of detecting additional sources is to correlate neutrino detections with sources where a hadronic electromagnetic signature is observed. If blazars are a significant source of neutrinos, the high-energy gamma rays produced in pionic decays in coincidence with the neutrinos may cascade in the strong photons fields present in blazar jets, leading to strong emission in the hard X-ray to MeV gamma-ray energy range. We here present plans for a search for neutrino emission from a large sample of hard X-ray sources from the BAT AGN Spectroscopic Survey (BASS).