Constraining high-energy neutrinos from tidal disruption events with IceCube high-energy starting events

TL;DR

This study uses 12.5 years of IceCube data to analyze correlations between high-energy neutrinos and tidal disruption events, setting constraints on their neutrino emission and jet fractions.

Contribution

It provides the first constraints on TDEs as neutrino sources using a large dataset and a maximum likelihood analysis, improving understanding of their role in high-energy neutrino production.

Findings

No significant correlation found between TDEs and neutrino events.

Constraints placed on TDE jet fraction and cosmic ray energy.

Limits on the diffuse neutrino flux from TDEs established.

Abstract

Tidal disruption events (TDEs) have been proposed as candidate sources of high-energy neutrinos. Successful and choked jets, as well as the accretion disk, corona, wind, and outflow regions in a TDE have been examined and shown to produce TeV - PeV neutrinos. In this work, we use the IceCube 12.5 year high energy starting events (HESE) dataset and perform a maximum likelihood analysis to investigate the spatial and temporal correlations between HESE dataset and a selected sample of 89 TDEs. Our results indicate that the currently observed data do not show any significant correlation and hence is consistent with the background only hypothesis. Using this result, we place constraints on the fraction of TDEs harboring intrinsic jets ($f_{\rm jet}$) and the corresponding isotropic-equivalent cosmic ray (CR) energy ($\mathcal{E}_{\rm CR}$). We note that even with limited statistics, we can constrain the parameter space as $\mathcal{E}_{\rm CR} \lesssim 3 \times 10^{53}$ erg for $f_{\rm jet} \gtrsim 0.6$ at more than 90% C.L. Finally, we discuss the theoretical implications of our results and the limits on the all-sky diffuse neutrino flux from TDEs. With more observational data in the electromagnetic band for TDEs and neutrino observations from IceCube and KM3NeT, our analysis can be used to place stringent constraints on physical parameters associated with TDEs.