Diffuse flux of PeV neutrinos from centrifugally accelerated protons in active galactic nuclei

¹ Department of Physics, University of North Bengal - Siliguri, WB, 734 013, India

^(a) rkdey2007phy@rediffmail.com (corresponding author)

Received: 6 August 2021
Accepted: 2 November 2021

Abstract

Evidence for high-energy astrophysical PeV neutrinos has been found in the IceCube experiment from an analysis with 7.5-year (2010–2017) data. Active galactic nuclei (AGN) are among the most prominent objects in the universe, and are widely speculated to be emitters of ultra-high-energy (UHE) cosmic rays with proton domination. Based on the standard two-step LLCD mechanism of particle acceleration, a transformation of energy occurs from AGN's central super-massive black hole (SMBH) rotation to high-energy protons. Protons can be accelerated up to energies and above, and might generate PeV neutrinos in the energy range through plausible hadronic interactions. The theoretically estimated revised extragalactic diffuse muon neutrino flux employing the “luminosity-dependent density evolution (LDDE)” model for the AGN luminosity function (LF) is found consistent with the IceCube level if only a fraction, of the total bolometric luminosity (BL) of AGN is being realizable to power the PeV neutrinos. In the Λ CDM cosmological framework with the LDDE-modeled LF and photon index distribution, about of the total BL is enough to power the IceCube neutrinos.