Analyzing the gamma-ray activity of neutrino emitter candidates: comparing TXS 0506+056 with other blazars

TL;DR

This study analyzes gamma-ray activity of blazars, especially TXS 0506+056, in relation to neutrino emissions, highlighting the challenges in detecting neutrino flares and emphasizing the need for larger, better-monitored neutrino telescopes.

Contribution

It provides a long-term gamma-ray monitoring comparison of TXS 0506+056 with other blazars, introducing the blazar duty cycle and assessing neutrino flux variability in a multi-messenger context.

Findings

Gamma-ray flares correlate with neutrino emission potential.

Single neutrino flares are difficult to detect with current detectors.

Monitoring and larger detectors are crucial for multi-messenger astrophysics.

Abstract

On 22nd of September 2017 the IceCube collaboration sent an alert for an EHE (Extreme High Energy) event, corresponding to the reconstruction of a muonic neutrino (IC-170922A) with energy $\sim 290$ TeV. A multi-wavelength follow-up campaign associated this neutrino event with a gamma-ray flaring state of the BL Lac TXS 0506+056 located at z=0.3365. From the same position of the sky a muonic neutrino excess is observed in a time window of 110 days around 13th of December 2014. These observations together suggest TXS 0506+056 as a possible neutrino emitter. We report here a long term gamma-ray monitoring of this source and we compare it with other blazars spatially correlated with astrophysical muonic neutrino events observed by IceCube. We characterise the most significant gamma-ray flares of the blazars in the sample and introduce the blazar duty cycle as an important parameter to be considered when assessing a possible neutrino counterpart. For the selected blazars we show the expected neutrino flux variability with different time binning assuming the gamma-rays observed by Fermi-LAT as a product of a leptohadronic emission scenario. The neutrino expectations from the blazar sample are then compared with the IceCube discovery flux searching for the optimal time bin in a multi-messenger context. This analysis indicates that the detection of a single flare represents a challenge for a single cubic kilometer detector, underlining the importance of increasing the size of current neutrino telescopes and obtaining a good monitoring of the entire sky through a global neutrino network.