Unified thermal model for photohadronic neutrino production in astrophysical sources

TL;DR

This paper introduces a unified blackbody-based model for photohadronic neutrino production in astrophysical sources, enabling better predictions of neutrino fluxes and flavor compositions across different source types.

Contribution

It presents a flexible blackbody spectrum model that captures neutrino flux behaviors in photohadronic sources, improving upon traditional power-law approaches.

Findings

The model accurately reproduces neutrino fluxes from known sources.

It classifies neutrino flavor compositions across parameter space.

It analyzes the impact on detector signals like track-to-shower ratios.

Abstract

Astrophysical neutrino fluxes are often modeled as power laws of the energy. This is reasonable in the case of hadronic sources, but it does not capture the behavior in photohadronic sources, where the spectrum depends on the properties of the target photons on which protons collide. This limits the possibility of a unified treatment of different sources. In order to overcome this difficulty, we model the target photons by a blackbody spectrum. This model is sufficiently flexible to reproduce neutrino fluxes from known photohadronic sources; we apply it to study the sensitivity of Dense Neutrino Arrays, Neutrino Telescopes and Neutrino Radio Arrays to photohadronic sources. We also classify the flavor composition of the neutrino spectrum in terms of the parameter space. We discuss the interplay with the experiments, studying the changes in the track-to-shower ratio induced by different flavor compositions, both within and outside the region of the Glashow resonance.