Evidence against star-forming galaxies as the dominant source of IceCube neutrinos

TL;DR

This paper presents evidence that star-forming galaxies are unlikely to be the main source of IceCube's high-energy neutrinos, based on gamma-ray background constraints and spectral analysis.

Contribution

It demonstrates that models linking star-forming galaxies to the majority of IceCube neutrinos are inconsistent with gamma-ray background measurements and spectral data.

Findings

Star-forming galaxies underpredict IceCube neutrino flux by about an order of magnitude.

Gamma-ray background constraints limit the contribution of star-forming galaxies to the neutrino flux.

A cosmic-ray spectral index of ~2.3 in starburst galaxies aligns with gamma-ray observations but not with neutrino data.

Abstract

The cumulative emission resulting from hadronic cosmic-ray interactions in star-forming galaxies (SFGs) has been proposed as the dominant contribution to the astrophysical neutrino flux at TeV to PeV energies reported by IceCube. The same particle interactions also inevitably create $\gamma$-ray emission that could be detectable as a component of the extragalactic $\gamma$-ray background (EGB), which is now measured with the Fermi-LAT in the energy range from 0.1 to 820 GeV. New studies of the blazar flux distribution at $\gamma$-ray energies above 50 GeV place an upper bound on the residual non-blazar component of the EGB. We show that these results are in strong tension with models that consider SFGs as the dominant source of the diffuse neutrino backgrounds. A characteristic spectral index for parent cosmic rays in starburst galaxies of $\Gamma_{\rm SB} \simeq 2.3$ for $dN/dE \propto E^{-\Gamma_{\rm SB}}$ is consistent with the observed scaling relation between $\gamma$-ray and IR luminosity for SFGs, the bounds from the non-blazar EGB, and the observed $\gamma$-ray spectra of individual starbursts, but underpredicts the IceCube data by approximately an order of magnitude.