Emergence of a neutrino flux above 5 PeV and implications for ultrahigh energy cosmic rays

TL;DR

This paper presents a combined analysis of neutrino and cosmic ray data from IceCube, KM3NeT, and Auger, revealing a possible common origin for ultra-high-energy neutrinos and cosmic rays and suggesting new source populations.

Contribution

It introduces a novel simultaneous fit of neutrino and cosmic ray data, supporting a unified origin hypothesis and proposing additional cosmic ray sources.

Findings

A phenomenological model fits combined data from three observatories.

Evidence suggests an additional cosmic ray source population.

Next-generation detectors could confirm the neutrino flux at these energies.

Abstract

The rare detections of astrophysical neutrinos with energies above 5~PeV by two neutrino telescopes underscore the existence of a flux at these energies. In addition to over a decade of data taken by the IceCube Neutrino Observatory, the KM3NeT neutrino telescope has recently highlighted their discovery of a possible $\mathcal{O}(100~PeV)$ neutrino candidate. A connection between the highest-energy astrophysical neutrinos and the highest-energy cosmic rays is expected, and well-established theoretically. Here, for the first time, we simultaneously fit the neutrino data from IceCube and KM3NeT, as well as the ultrahigh-energy cosmic ray spectrum and composition data from the Pierre Auger Observatory (Auger), to test a common-origin hypothesis. We show that a phenomenological model is able to describe the combined data across these three observatories, and, depending on the true energy of the event detected by KM3NeT, suggests an additional cosmic ray source population not yet robustly detected by Auger. Although a measurement of the neutrino flux in this energy regime is at the sensitivity limit of cubic-kilometer-scale neutrino telescopes, next-generation observatories, such IceCube-Gen2, will have the sensitivity to make a significant detection of this flux.