Fermi/LAT counterparts of IceCube neutrinos above 100 TeV

¹ Anton Pannekoek Institute for Astronomy, University of Amsterdam, Science Park 904, 1098 XH Amsterdam, The Netherlands
e-mail: felicia.krauss@uva.nl
² GRAPPA, University of Amsterdam, Science Park 904, 1098 XH Amsterdam, The Netherlands
³ Department of Physics, Indian Institute of Technology Kharagpur, Kharagpur, West Bengal, 721302, India
⁴ Oskar Klein Centre and Dept. of Physics, Stockholm University, 10691 Stockholm, Sweden
⁵ Dr. Remeis Sternwarte & ECAP, Universität Erlangen-Nürnberg, Sternwartstrasse 7, 96049 Bamberg, Germany
⁶ Institut für Theoretische Physik und Astrophysik, Universität Würzburg, Emil-Fischer-Str. 31, 97074 Würzburg, Germany
⁷ Centre for Space Research, North-West University, Private Bag X6001, Potchefstroom, 2520, South Africa
⁸ Theoretical Astrophysics, T-2, MS B227, Los Alamos National Laboratory, Los Alamos, NM, 87545, USA
⁹ Department of Physics and Astronomy, Johns Hopkins University, Baltimore, MD, 21218, USA

Received: 3 September 2018
Accepted: 17 October 2018

Abstract

The IceCube Collaboration has published four years of data and the observed neutrino flux is significantly in excess of the expected atmospheric background. Due to the steeply falling atmospheric background spectrum, events at the highest energies are most likely extraterrestrial. In our previous approach we have studied blazars as the possible origin of the High-Energy Starting Events (HESE) neutrino events at PeV energies. In this work we extend our study to include all HESE neutrinos (which does not include IC 170922A) at or above a reconstructed energy of 100 TeV, but below 1 PeV. We study the X-ray and γ-ray data of all (∼200) 3LAC blazars that are positionally consistent with the neutrino events above 100 TeV to determine the maximum neutrino flux from these sources. This larger sample allows us to better constrain the scaling factor between the observed and maximum number of neutrino events. We find that when we consider a realistic neutrino spectrum and other factors, the number of neutrinos is in good agreement with the detected number of IceCube HESE events. We also show that there is no direct correlation between Fermi/LAT γ-ray flux and the IceCube neutrino flux and that the expected number of neutrinos is consistent with the non-detection of individual bright blazars.