Very high energy neutrino emission from the core of low luminosity AGNs triggered by magnetic reconnection acceleration

TL;DR

This paper proposes that magnetic reconnection in low luminosity AGN cores accelerates protons, leading to VHE neutrino production consistent with IceCube observations, highlighting a new potential astrophysical neutrino source.

Contribution

It introduces a novel mechanism for VHE neutrino production via magnetic reconnection in AGN cores, linking proton acceleration to observed neutrino fluxes.

Findings

Relativistic protons accelerated by magnetic reconnection produce VHE neutrinos.

The calculated diffuse neutrino flux matches IceCube data.

Magnetic reconnection is a viable process for high-energy neutrino generation in AGNs.

Abstract

The detection of astrophysical very high energy (VHE) neutrinos in the range of TeV-PeV energies by the IceCube observatory has opened a new season in high energy astrophysics. Energies ~PeV imply that the neutrinos are originated from sources where cosmic rays (CRs) can be accelerated up to ~ 10^{17}eV. Recently, we have shown that the observed TeV gamma-rays from radio-galaxies may have a hadronic origin in their nuclear region and in such a case this could lead to neutrino production. In this paper we show that relativistic protons accelerated by magnetic reconnection in the core region of these sources may produce VHE neutrinos via the decay of charged pions produced by photo-meson process. We have also calculated the diffuse flux of VHE neutrinos and found that it can be associated to the IceCube data.