Search for Neutrinos from Populations of Optical Transients

TL;DR

This paper reports on IceCube's latest searches for neutrinos from optical transients like Tidal Disruption Events and AT2018cow, constraining their contributions to the diffuse astrophysical neutrino flux and discussing future survey prospects.

Contribution

It provides new limits on neutrino emissions from TDEs and AT2018cow, and discusses how upcoming optical surveys can enhance future neutrino searches.

Findings

Limits on TDE contributions to neutrino flux (<1.3% jetted, <26% non-jetted)

Upper bounds on neutrino emission from AT2018cow

Discussion of future survey improvements (ZTF, LSST)

Abstract

Since the detection of high-energy cosmic neutrinos at the IceCube Neutrino Observatory in 2013, there has been an on-going search to find the origins of this flux. Despite recent evidence identifying a flaring blazar as a possible neutrino source, the vast majority of the diffuse neutrino flux measured by IceCube remains unexplained. Here, the latest IceCube results testing time-dependent correlation between neutrinos and Tidal Disruption Events (TDEs) are presented, limiting the contribution of jetted and non-jetted TDEs to the diffuse astrophysical neutrino flux to be less than 1.3% and 26% respectively at 90% confidence level. In addition, a dedicated search for neutrinos from the extraordinary transient AT2018cow are presented, and upper limits on the integrated neutrino emission are derived. Expected improvements from new and upcoming time domain optical surveys (such as ZTF and LSST) are also introduced.