PeV Neutrinos from Ultra-High-Energy Cosmic Rays

TL;DR

This paper explores whether ultra-high-energy cosmic ray interactions with cosmic backgrounds can explain IceCube's detected PeV neutrinos, finding that simulated fluxes are too low to account for observations.

Contribution

It demonstrates that cosmogenic neutrino fluxes from UHECR interactions are insufficient to explain IceCube's PeV neutrino events.

Findings

Simulated neutrino fluxes are at least an order of magnitude below IceCube observations.

Cosmogenic neutrino production cannot fully account for the detected PeV neutrinos.

The study uses CRPropa 2.0 for detailed propagation simulations.

Abstract

We investigate the possibility that the recently detected TeV-PeV neutrino events by IceCube can originate from extragalactic ultra-high-energy cosmic ray interactions with the cosmic microwave background or the UV/optical/IR background. This is done by simulating the propagation of the cosmic rays from their sources to the observer, including the production and propagation of secondary neutrinos and gamma rays. For this purpose we use the publicly available simulation package CRPropa 2.0. We find that in all the scenarios considered here the simulated neutrino flux level remains at least one order of magnitude below the flux level indicated by the IceCube events, thus showing it is difficult to interpret the IceCube events in terms of a cosmogenic neutrino flux.