H.E.S.S. searches for TeV gamma rays associated to high-energy neutrinos

TL;DR

This paper reports on H.E.S.S. telescope searches for very high energy gamma rays correlated with high-energy neutrino events detected by IceCube, aiming to identify astrophysical sources of cosmic rays through multi-messenger observations.

Contribution

It presents the first systematic search for VHE gamma-ray emission associated with IceCube neutrino events using H.E.S.S., including follow-up observations of a notable neutrino event and multi-wavelength analysis.

Findings

No significant gamma-ray emission detected in the follow-up observations.

Successful rapid-response observations within hours of neutrino detections.

Multi-wavelength context enhances understanding of potential sources.

Abstract

The detection of an astrophysical flux of high-energy neutrinos by IceCube is a major step forward in the search for the origin of cosmic rays, as this emission is expected to originate in hadronic interactions taking place in or near cosmic-ray accelerators. No neutrino point sources, or significant correlation with known astrophysical objects, have been identified in the IceCube data so far. The hadronic interactions responsible for the neutrino emission should also lead to the production of high-energy gamma rays. The search for neutrino sources can then be performed by studying the spatial and temporal correlations between neutrino events and very high energy (VHE, E > 100 GeV) gamma rays. We report here on the search for VHE gamma-ray emission with the H.E.S.S. imaging air Cherenkov telescopes (IACTs) at the reconstructed position of muon neutrino events detected by IceCube. We will provide an up-to-date summary of the extensive program to perform prompt IACT observations of realtime IceCube neutrino event positions. A recent highlight of this program are the H.E.S.S. observations during the broad multi-wavelength campaign that followed the detection of the neutrino event IceCube-170922A arriving from a direction consistent with the location of a flaring gamma-ray blazar TXS 0506+056 in September 2017. We'll present the H.E.S.S. observations obtained within ~4h hours of the neutrino detection as well as a complementary search for gamma-ray emission at longer timescales and put them into the multi-wavelength and multi-messenger context.