Particle theory

Abstract:

Active galactic nuclei (AGN) are prime candidate sources of the high-energy, astrophysical neutrinos detected by IceCube. This is demonstrated by the real-time multimessenger detection of the blazar TXS 0506+056 and the recent evidence of neutrino emission from NGC 1068 from a separate time-averaged study. However, the production mechanism of the astrophysical neutrinos in AGN is not well established, which can be resolved via correlation studies with photon observations. For neutrinos produced due to photohadronic interactions in AGN, in addition to a correlation of neutrinos with high-energy photons, there would also be a correlation of neutrinos with photons emitted at radio wavelengths. In this work, we perform an in-depth stacking study of the correlation between 15 GHz radio observations of AGN reported in the MOJAVE XV catalog, and 10 yr of neutrino data from IceCube. We also use a time-dependent approach, which improves the statistical power of the stacking analysis. No significant correlation was found for both analyses, and upper limits are reported. When compared to the IceCube diffuse flux, at 100 TeV and for a spectral index of 2.5, the upper limits derived are ∼3% and ∼9% for the time-averaged and time-dependent cases, respectively.

Abstract:

We show that if dark matter consists of QCD axions in the post-inflationary scenario more than ten percent of it efficiently collapses into Bose stars at matter-radiation equality. Such a result is mostly independent of the present uncertainties on the axion mass. This large population of solitons, with asteroid masses and Earth-Moon distance sizes, might plausibly survive until today, with potentially interesting implications for phenomenology and experimental searches.