Neutrino emission from high-energy component gamma-ray bursts

TL;DR

This paper investigates the potential of gamma-ray bursts to produce high-energy cosmic rays and neutrinos, using observational data and theoretical models to estimate neutrino fluxes and assess detectability by IceCube.

Contribution

It provides the first estimates of neutrino flux from GRBs based on recent high-energy observations and fireball models, highlighting the potential for neutrino detection.

Findings

Fermi bursts show high-energy spectral extension up to 30 GeV

GRB941017 indicates significant baryon loading in GRBs

IceCube could detect neutrinos from GRBs if they produce cosmic rays

Abstract

Gamma-ray bursts have the potential to produce the particle energies (up to $10^{21}$\,eV) and the energy budget ($10^{44}\, \rm{erg\, yr^{-1}\, Mpc^{-3}}$) to accommodate the spectrum of the highest energy cosmic rays; on the other hand, there is no observational evidence that they accelerate hadrons. The Fermi GST recently observed two bursts that exhibit a power-law high-energy extension of the typical (Band) photon spectrum that extends to $\sim 30$ GeV. On the basis of fireball phenomenology we argue that they, along with GRB941017 observed by EGRET in 1994, show indirect evidence for considerable baryon loading. Since the detection of neutrinos is the only unambiguous way to establish that GRBs accelerate protons, we use two methods to estimate the neutrino flux produced when they interact with fireball photons to produce charged pions and neutrinos. While the number of events expected from the Fermi bursts detected to date is small, we conclude that an event like GRB941017 will be detected by the IceCube neutrino telescope if gamma-ray bursts are indeed the sources of the observed cosmic rays.