Constraining high-energy neutrinos from choked-jet supernovae with IceCube high-energy starting events

TL;DR

This study uses six years of IceCube data to search for neutrino signals from various types of supernovae with jets, setting upper limits on their contribution to cosmic neutrinos and discussing future detector prospects.

Contribution

First comprehensive analysis constraining high-energy neutrino emission from choked-jet supernovae using IceCube HESE data, establishing new upper limits on their cosmic ray energy output.

Findings

No significant neutrino-supernova correlation found.

Upper limit on cosmic ray energy in supernova jets: ${ m 10}^{52}$ erg.

Constraints inform future neutrino detector designs and sensitivities.

Abstract

Different types of core-collapse supernovae (SNe) have been considered as candidate sources of high-energy cosmic neutrinos. Stripped-envelope SNe, including energetic events like hypernovae and super-luminous SNe, are of particular interest. They may harbor relativistic jets, which are capable of explaining the diversity among gamma-ray bursts (GRBs), low-luminosity GRBs, ultra-long GRBs, and broadline Type Ib/c SNe. Using the six-year IceCube data on high-energy starting events (HESEs), we perform an unbinned maximum likelihood analysis to search for spatial and temporal coincidences with 222 samples of SNe Ib/c. We find that the present data are consistent with the background only hypothesis, by which we place new upper constraints on the isotropic-equivalent energy of cosmic rays, ${\mathcal E}_{\rm cr}\lesssim{10}^{52}~{\rm erg}$, in the limit that all SNe are accompanied by on-axis jets. Our results demonstrate that not only upgoing muon neutrinos but also HESE data enable us to constrain the potential contribution of these SNe to the diffuse neutrino flux observed in IceCube. We also discuss implications for the next-generation neutrino detectors such as IceCube-Gen2.