High-Energy Neutrino Flares From X-Ray Bright and Dark Tidal Disruptions Events

TL;DR

This paper models neutrino emissions from different types of tidal disruption events (TDEs), assessing their contribution to cosmic neutrino fluxes and setting limits on cosmic-ray acceleration based on non-detections.

Contribution

It provides semi-analytical calculations of neutrino spectra for both X-ray bright and dark TDEs, estimating their fluxes and implications for cosmic-ray loading factors.

Findings

X-ray bright TDEs contribute less than 10% to IceCube's diffuse neutrino flux.

Non-detection constrains the cosmic-ray loading factor to less than 20.

Dark TDEs with choked jets could still produce detectable neutrinos.

Abstract

X-ray and $\gamma$-ray observations by the Swift satellite revealed that a fraction of tidal disruption events (TDEs) have relativistic jets. Jetted TDEs have been considered as potential sources of very high-energy cosmic-rays and neutrinos. In this work, using semi-analytical methods, we calculate neutrino spectra of X-ray bright TDEs with powerful jets and dark TDEs with possible choked jets, respectively. We estimate their neutrino fluxes and find that the non-detection would give us an upper limit on the cosmic-ray loading factor, $\xi_{\rm cr}\lesssim20$, for Sw J1644+57. We show that X-ray bright TDEs make a sub-dominant ($\lesssim5-10$%) contribution to IceCube's diffuse neutrino flux, and study possible contributions of X-ray dark TDEs given that particles are accelerated in choked jets or disk-winds. We discuss future prospects for multi-messenger searches of the brightest TDEs.