Estimating the Neutrino Flux from Choked Gamma-Ray Bursts

TL;DR

This paper estimates the neutrino flux from choked gamma-ray bursts, suggesting they could significantly contribute to the astrophysical neutrino flux observed by IceCube, especially if their local rate is within certain bounds.

Contribution

It provides detailed calculations of neutrino production from choked GRBs and predicts event rates for current and future neutrino telescopes.

Findings

Choked GRBs can contribute substantially to the observed neutrino flux.

Predicted neutrino event rates are within detectable ranges for IceCube and KM3NeT.

The contribution depends on the energy channeled into protons and the local rate of these events.

Abstract

The strong constraints from the Fermi-LAT data on the isotropic gamma-ray background suggest that the neutrinos observed by IceCube might possibly come from sources that are hidden to gamma-ray observations. A possibility recently discussed in the literature is that neutrinos may come from jets of collapsing massive stars which fail to break out of the stellar envelope, and for this reason they are known as choked jets, or choked Gamma-Ray Bursts (GRBs). In this paper, we estimate the neutrino flux and spectrum expected from these sources, focusing on Type II SNe. We perform detailed calculations of pg interactions, accounting for all the neutrino production channels and scattering angles. We provide predictions of expected event rates for operating neutrino telescopes, such as ANTARES and IceCube, as well as for the future generation telescope KM3NeT. We find that for GRB energies channeled into protons spanning between 10^51 - 10^53 erg, choked GRBs may substantially contribute to the observed astrophysical neutrino flux, if their local rate is 80 - 1 Gpc^-3 yr^-1 respectively.