Triangulating Black Hole Forming Stellar Collapses through Neutrinos

TL;DR

This paper proposes a novel neutrino triangulation method based on the abrupt cutoff at black hole formation, significantly improving the localization accuracy of stellar collapses compared to traditional rise-time methods.

Contribution

It introduces a new triangulation technique utilizing the neutrino signal cutoff, enhancing the precision of pinpointing stellar collapses and black hole formation events.

Findings

Cutoff-based triangulation improves pointing accuracy by over an order of magnitude.

Method is robust against neutrino mixing scenarios.

Effective for galactic and extragalactic black hole forming collapses.

Abstract

In the event of a black hole (BH) forming stellar collapse, the neutrino signal should terminate abruptly at the moment of BH formation, after a phase of steady accretion. Since neutrinos are expected to reach Earth hours before the electromagnetic signal, the combined detection of the neutrino burst through multiple neutrino telescopes could allow to promptly determine the angular location of a nearby stellar collapse in the sky with high precision. In this paper, we contrast the triangulation pointing procedure that relies on the rise time of the neutrino curve, often considered in the literature, to the one that takes advantage of the cutoff of the neutrino curve at the moment of BH formation. By forecasting the neutrino signal expected in the IceCube Neutrino Observatory, Hyper-Kamiokande and DUNE, we devise a strategy to optimize the identification of the rise and cutoff time of the neutrino curve. We show that the triangulation method developed by employing the end tail of the neutrino curve allows to achieve at least one order of magnitude improvement in the pointing precision for a galactic burst, while being insensitive to the neutrino mixing scenario. The triangulation pointing method based on the cutoff of the neutrino curve will also guarantee a better performance for BH forming collapses occurring beyond our own Galaxy.