Individual GRB sensitivity of a cubic-kilometer deep-sea neutrino telescope KM3NeT

TL;DR

This paper evaluates the potential of the KM3NeT neutrino telescope to detect neutrinos from gamma-ray bursts by analyzing individual GRB sensitivities using electromagnetic data and detector performance models.

Contribution

It presents a method to estimate the neutrino detection probability for individual GRBs with KM3NeT based on their electromagnetic observations and detector capabilities.

Findings

Estimated neutrino event rates for individual GRBs.

Demonstrated background suppression using angular resolution and timing.

Identified GRBs with high detection likelihood.

Abstract

Gamma-ray bursts (GRB) are powerful and highly variable sources of gamma rays that indicate the existence of cosmic particle accelerators. Under the assumption of hadronic acceleration in the jet, the expected neutrino energy spectrum is derived according to the intrinsic fireball model parameters and to the observed electromagnetic data of GRBs measured with ground-based and satellite observations. Using the performance characteristics of a cubic-kilometre scale neutrino detector placed in the Mediterranean Sea, the number of events is calculated individually for all the GRBs having a known redshift below the horizon of this detector. The good angular resolution of this detector and the narrow time windows around the GRB detection time allow suppression of almost all the atmospheric neutrino background. From the SWIFT GRB catalogue, we have derived the mean characteristics of a burst in order to be detected as an individual point source by a cubic-kilometre detector.