Implications of a proton blazar inspired model on correlated observations of neutrinos with gamma-ray flaring blazars

TL;DR

This paper explores a proton blazar model where non-relativistic protons in jets interact with shock-accelerated protons to explain observed gamma-ray and neutrino emissions from flaring blazars, addressing limitations of previous models.

Contribution

It introduces a proton blazar model involving non-relativistic protons for explaining neutrino and gamma-ray observations, contrasting with prior photo-meson and hadronuclear models.

Findings

The model can reproduce the electromagnetic spectrum of the blazars.

It accounts for the observed neutrino events in correlation with gamma-ray flaring.

The approach resolves issues faced by previous interaction models.

Abstract

Recent detection of the neutrino events IceCube-170922A, 13 muon-neutrino events observed in 2014-2015 and IceCube-141209A by IceCube observatory from the Blazars, namely TXS 0506+056, PKS 0502+049/TXS 0506+056 and GB6 J1040+0617 respectively in the state of enhanced gamma-ray emission, indicates the acceleration of cosmic rays in the blazar jets. The photo-meson ($p\gamma$) interaction cannot explain the IceCube observations of 13 neutrino events. The non-detection of broadline emission in the optical spectra of the IceCube blazars, however, question the hadronuclear (pp) interaction interpretation through relativistic jet meets with high density cloud. In this work, we investigate the proton blazar model in which the non-relativistic protons that come into existence under the charge neutrality condition of the blazar jet can offer sufficient target matter for $pp$ interaction with shock-accelerated protons, to describe the observed high-energy gamma-rays and neutrino signal from the said blazars. Our findings suggest that the model can explain consistently the observed electromagnetic spectrum in combination with appropriate number of neutrino events from the corresponding blazars.