A neutrino flare candidate potentially associated with X-ray emission from tidal disruption event ATLAS17jrp

TL;DR

This study reports a potential neutrino flare associated with the TDE ATLAS17jrp, suggesting a possible link between TDEs with X-ray emission and high-energy neutrino production, based on ten years of IceCube data.

Contribution

First time analysis of a decade of IceCube data focusing on X-ray bright TDEs, identifying a neutrino flare candidate coincident with ATLAS17jrp.

Findings

Neutrino flare candidate temporally and spatially coincident with ATLAS17jrp.

The simple lepton-hadronic model explains neutrino data around 100 TeV.

Modest statistical significance with a post-trial p-value of 0.01.

Abstract

Tidal disruption events (TDEs), in which stars are disrupted by supermassive black holes, have been proposed as potential sources of high-energy neutrinos through hadronic interactions. X-ray-bright TDEs provide dense photon fields conducive to neutrino production via proton-photon ($p\gamma$) processes. We conducted a time-dependent unbinned likelihood analysis of ten years (2008-2018) of IceCube muon-track data, focusing on ten TDEs with confirmed X-ray detections during this period. We report a neutrino flare candidate spatially and temporally coincident with the TDE ATLAS17jrp, occurring 19 days after the onset of its X-ray activity and lasting for 56 days, with a post-trial $p$-value of 0.01. This significance is modest, representing a hint of an association. We illustrate the neutrino emission using a simple lepton-hadronic model, where X-ray photons serve as target fields. While this model can account for the neutrino data around 100 TeV, the low-energy neutrinos may imply contributions from an additional component. Although constrained by the sample size of X-ray-detected TDEs, these results underscore the need for high-cadence X-ray monitoring and future neutrino observatories to further explore the connection between TDEs and high-energy neutrinos.