Inspecting the supernova gamma-ray burst connection with high-energy neutrinos

TL;DR

This paper explores the connection between supernovae and gamma-ray bursts by modeling high-energy neutrino production from jets with varying Lorentz factors, suggesting non-successful jets could significantly contribute to IceCube's neutrino flux.

Contribution

It introduces a comprehensive model linking supernovae, gamma-ray bursts, and neutrino production across different jet Lorentz factors, providing new constraints on jet rates from neutrino observations.

Findings

Diffuse neutrino emission from mildly relativistic jets can explain IceCube data.

IceCube data constrains the rate of non-successful jets to less than a few tens of percent of the supernova rate.

Models predict increased neutrino flux with more data, tightening constraints on jet populations.

Abstract

Long-duration gamma-ray bursts (GRBs) have been often considered as the natural evolution of some core-collapse supernovae (SNe). While GRBs with relativistic jets emit an electromagnetic signal, GRBs with mildly relativistic jets are opaque to photons and, therefore, could be detectable through neutrinos only. We discuss the possibility that successful GRBs and mildly relativistic jets belong to the same class of astrophysical transients with different Lorentz factor Gamma_b and study the production of high-energy neutrinos as a function of Gamma_b, by including both proton-photon and proton-proton interactions. By assuming a SN-GRB connection, we find that the diffuse neutrino emission from optically thick jets with Lorentz factors lower than the ones of successful GRBs can be one of the main components of the observed IceCube high-energy neutrino flux. Moreover, under the assumption that all these jets belong to the same class of astrophysical transients, we show that the IceCube high-energy neutrino data provide indirect constraints on the rate of non-successful jets, favoring a local rate lower than tens of percent of the local SN rate. These limits are currently comparable to the ones obtained in dedicated searches on choked sources and are expected to become tighter with accumulation of more high-energy neutrino data.