Choked precessing jets in tidal disruption events and high-energy neutrinos

TL;DR

This paper investigates the conditions under which misaligned precessing jets in tidal disruption events (TDEs) are choked or successful, and explores their potential to produce high-energy neutrinos observed by IceCube.

Contribution

It revisits jet break-out conditions for misaligned precessing jets and calculates neutrino fluxes from choked jets, linking them to observed neutrino events and diffuse flux.

Findings

Neutrino flux from highly misaligned choked jets can explain some observed neutrinos.

Choked jets could contribute up to 10% of the diffuse neutrino flux.

The minimum jet power for successful breakout remains unchanged despite collimation effects.

Abstract

It has been suggested that relativistic jets might have been commonly formed in tidal disruption events (TDEs), but those with relatively weak power could be choked by the surrounding envelope. The discovery of high-energy neutrinos possibly associated with some normal TDEs may support this picture in the hypothesis that the neutrinos are produced by choked jets. Recently, it was noted that disrupted stars generally have misaligned orbits with respect to the supermassive black hole spin axis and highly misaligned precessing jets are more likely to be choked. Here we revisit the jet break-out condition for misaligned precessing jets by considering the jet could be collimated by the cocoon pressure while propagating in the disk wind envelope. The jet head opening angle decreases as the jet propagates in the envelope, but the minimum power of a successful jet remains unchanged in terms of the physical jet power. We further calculate the neutrino flux from choked precessing jets, assuming that the cocoon energy does not exceed the kinetic energy of the disk wind. We find that neutrino flux from highly misaligned choked jets is sufficient to explain the neutrinos from AT2019aalc, while it is marginal to explain the neutrinos from AT2019dsg and AT2019fdr. The latter could be produced by weakly misaligned choked jets, since the duty cycle that the jet sweeps across increases as the misaligned angle decreases. We also show that the population of choked TDE jets could contribute to ~10% of the observed diffuse neutrino flux measured by IceCube.