Testing the Association of Supermassive Black Hole Infrared Flares and High-energy Neutrinos

TL;DR

This study investigates whether supermassive black hole accretion flares with IR echoes are sources of high-energy cosmic neutrinos, finding no significant associations and challenging previous hypotheses.

Contribution

The paper compiles a sample of IR echoing accretion flares and cross-matches with neutrino alerts, providing new observational constraints on their connection.

Findings

No significant spatial or temporal coincidences found.

Results challenge previous suggestions linking flares to neutrino production.

The study sets constraints on the contribution of such flares to the neutrino flux.

Abstract

The physical origin of the observed cosmic neutrinos remains an open question and the subject of active research. While matter accretion onto supermassive black holes is long thought to accelerate particles to high energies, it has recently been suggested that tidal disruption events, and accretion flares in general, with prominent IR echoes can account for a fraction of the diffuse high-energy neutrino signal. Motivated by this result, we compile a sample of nearby accretion flares detected in the NEOWISE survey featuring strong IR echoes, and we cross-match it with the latest catalog of neutrino alerts, IceCat-1. We recover only a single spatial coincidence between the two catalogs, consistent with a chance coincidence. We find no temporal and spatial coincidences between the two samples, which, given the properties of our sample, appears to challenge previous conclusions. We discuss the physical implications of our results and potential future explorations.