Hunting for neutrino emission from multi-frequency variable sources

TL;DR

This study investigates potential correlations between multi-frequency electromagnetic flares and neutrino emissions from astrophysical sources, finding no significant signals but noting intriguing trends in infrared flaring stages that warrant further research.

Contribution

The paper introduces a comprehensive analysis of temporal and spatial correlations between multi-frequency flares and neutrinos, highlighting the importance of improved light-curve catalogs for future neutrino detection.

Findings

No significant neutrino emissions detected from the analyzed sources.

Infrared flaring stages of blazars may be correlated with neutrino arrival times.

Potential neutrino associations with specific blazar flaring behaviors are suggested.

Abstract

Pinpointing the neutrino sources is crucial to unveil the mystery of high-energy cosmic rays. The search for neutrino-source candidates from coincident neutrino-photon signatures and electromagnetic objects with peculiar flaring behaviors have the potential to increase our chances of finding neutrino emitters. In this paper, we first study the temporal correlations of astrophysical flares with neutrinos, considering a few hundreds of multi-frequency sources from ALMA, WISE, Swift, and Fermi in the containment regions of IceCube high-energy alerts. Furthermore, the spatial correlations between blazars and neutrinos are investigated using the subset of 10-year IceCube track-like neutrinos with around 250 thousand events. In the second test, we account for 2700 blazars with different types of flaring phases in addition to sole position. No significant neutrino emissions were found from our analyses. Our results indicate an interesting trend showing the infrared flaring stages of WISE blazars might be correlated with arrival times of the neutrino alerts. Possible overflow of neutrinos associated with two of our blazar sub-samples are also illustrated. One is characterized by a significant flaring lag in infrared with respect to gamma-rays, like seen for TXS0506+056, and the other is characterized by highly simultaneous infrared and gamma-ray flares. These phenomena suggest the need to improve current multi-frequency light-curve catalogs to pair with the advent of more sensitive neutrino observatories.