Constraints on cosmic ray loading and PeV neutrino production in blazars

TL;DR

This paper constrains the cosmic ray loading and PeV neutrino production in blazars using IceCube data, finding that blazars contribute at most 50% of the observed PeV neutrino flux and setting limits on their cosmic ray power.

Contribution

It provides the first detailed constraints on the cosmic ray loading factor in blazars based on IceCube null results, linking neutrino flux limits to cosmic ray acceleration in jets.

Findings

Upper limits on cosmic ray loading factor in blazars: $\xi_{cr} extless(2-10)\zeta^{-1}$.

Cumulative PeV neutrino flux from all-sky blazars is at most 50% of IceCube observations.

Constraints imply significant limits on cosmic ray acceleration efficiency in blazar jets.

Abstract

IceCube has detected a cumulative flux of PeV neutrinos, which origin is unknown. Blazars, active galactic nuclei with relativistic jets pointing to us, are long and widely expected to be one of the strong candidates of high energy neutrino sources. The neutrino production depends strongly on the cosmic ray power of blazar jets, which is largely unknown. The recent null results in stacking searches of neutrinos for several blazar samples by IceCube put upper limits on the neutrino fluxes from these blazars. Here we compute the cosmic ray power and PeV neutrino flux of Fermi-LAT blazars, and find that the upper limits for known blazar sources give stringent constraint on the cosmic ray loading factor of blazar jets (i.e., the ratio of the cosmic ray to bolometric radiation luminosity of blazar jets), $\xi_{\rm cr}\la(2-10)\zeta^{-1}$ (with $\zeta\la1$ the remained fraction of cosmic ray energy when propagate into the blazar broad line region) for flat cosmic ray spectrum, and that the cumulative PeV neutrino flux contributed by all-sky blazars is a fraction $\la(10-50)\%$ of the IceCube detected flux.