High-energy neutrino production in clusters of galaxies

Hussain, Saqib; Batista, Rafael Alves; Gouveia Dal Pino, Elisabete M. de and Dolag, Klaus (2021): High-energy neutrino production in clusters of galaxies. In: Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society, Vol. 507, No. 2: pp. 1762-1774

Abstract

Clusters of galaxies can potentially produce cosmic rays (CRs) up to very high energies via large-scale shocks and turbulent acceleration. Due to their unique magnetic-field configuration, CRs with energy <= 10(17) eV can be trapped within these structures over cosmological time-scales, and generate secondary particles, including neutrinos and gamma rays, through interactions with the background gas and photons. In this work, we compute the contribution from clusters of galaxies to the diffuse neutrino background. We employ 3D cosmological magnetohydrodynamical simulations of structure formation to model the turbulent intergalactic medium. We use the distribution of clusters within this cosmological volume to extract the properties of this population, including mass, magnetic field, temperature, and density. We propagate CRs in this environment using multidimensional Monte Carlo simulations across different redshifts (from z similar to 5 to z = 0), considering all relevant photohadronic, photonuclear, and hadronuclear interaction processes. We find that, for CRs injected with a spectral index alpha = 1.5-2.7 and cutoff energy E-max = 10(16)-5 x 10(17) eV, clusters contribute to a sizeable fraction to the diffuse flux observed by the IceCube Neutrino Observatory, but most of the contribution comes from clusters with M greater than or similar to 10(14) M-circle dot and redshift z less than or similar to 0.3. If we include the cosmological evolution of the CR sources, this flux can be even higher.

• Item Type: Journal article
• Faculties: Physics
• Subjects: 500 Science > 530 Physics
• ISSN: 0035-8711
• Language: English