High-Energy Neutrinos and Gamma-Rays from Non-Relativistic Shock-Powered Transients

TL;DR

This paper models how non-relativistic shock-powered transients can produce high-energy neutrinos and gamma-rays, linking optical observations to their potential contribution to cosmic backgrounds, and finds they contribute only a small fraction of the observed neutrino flux.

Contribution

It introduces a novel method connecting optical fluence of transients to their maximum neutrino and gamma-ray emission, applying it across various extragalactic transient classes.

Findings

Several luminous transients can accelerate protons to >10^{16} eV.

Some hydrogen-poor supernovae may be hidden gamma-ray sources.

Known transients contribute at most a few percent to the IceCube neutrino background.

Abstract

Shock interaction has been argued to play a role in powering a range of optical transients, including supernovae (particularly the superluminous class), classical novae, stellar mergers, tidal disruption events, and fast blue optical transients. These same shocks can accelerate relativistic ions, generating high-energy neutrino and gamma-ray emission via hadronic pion production. The recent discovery of time-correlated optical and gamma-ray emission in classical novae has revealed the important role of radiative shocks in powering these events, enabling an unprecedented view of the properties of ion acceleration, including its efficiency and energy spectrum, under similar physical conditions to shocks in extragalactic transients. Here we introduce a model for connecting the radiated optical fluence of non-relativistic transients to their maximal neutrino and gamma-ray fluence. We apply this technique to a wide range of extragalactic transient classes in order to place limits on their contributions to the cosmological high-energy gamma-ray and neutrino backgrounds. Based on a simple model for diffusive shock acceleration at radiative shocks, calibrated to novae, we demonstrate that several of the most luminous transients can accelerate protons up to energies $E_{\rm max} \gtrsim 10^{16}$ eV, sufficient to contribute to the IceCube astrophysical background. Furthermore, several of the considered sources$-$particularly hydrogen-poor supernovae$-$may serve as "hidden" gamma-ray sources due to the high gamma-ray opacity of their ejecta, evading constraints imposed by the non-blazar Fermi-LAT background. However, adopting an ion acceleration efficiency $\sim$ 0.3-1$\%$ motivated by nova observations, we find that currently known classes of non-relativistic, potentially shock-powered transients contribute at most a few percent of the total IceCube background.