Constraining High-energy Neutrino Emission from Supernovae with IceCube

Abstract

Core-collapse supernovae are a promising potential high-energy neutrino source class. We test for correlation between seven years of IceCube neutrino data and a catalog containing more than 1000 core-collapse supernovae of types IIn and IIP and a sample of stripped-envelope supernovae. We search both for neutrino emission from individual supernovae as well as for combined emission from the whole supernova sample, through a stacking analysis. No significant spatial or temporal correlation of neutrinos with the cataloged supernovae was found. All scenarios were tested against the background expectation and together yield an overall p-value of 93%; therefore, they show consistency with the background only. The derived upper limits on the total energy emitted in neutrinos are 1.7 × 1048 erg for stripped-envelope supernovae, 2.8 × 1048 erg for type IIP, and 1.3 × 1049 erg for type IIn SNe, the latter disfavoring models with optimistic assumptions for neutrino production in interacting supernovae. We conclude that stripped-envelope supernovae and supernovae of type IIn do not contribute more than 14.6% and 33.9%, respectively, to the diffuse neutrino flux in the energy range of about [ 103–105] GeV, assuming that the neutrino energy spectrum follows a power-law with an index of −2.5. Under the same assumption, we can only constrain the contribution of type IIP SNe to no more than 59.9%. Thus, core-collapse supernovae of types IIn and stripped-envelope supernovae can both be ruled out as the dominant source of the diffuse neutrino flux under the given assumptions.

Low- and High-energy Neutrinos from SN 2023ixf in M101

“…On the other hand, this SN appears to be a relatively "standard" Type II core-collapse event, both in terms of size and mass of the progenitor (Kilpatrick et al 2023), and spectroscopic (Yamanaka et al 2023) and photometric evolution (Hosseinzadeh et al 2023). This conclusion is consistent with the results reported by Abbasi (2023) who found no significant spatial or temporal correlation of neutrinos with cataloged supernovae. In fact, their analysis found that the Type IIn and IIP SNe emit less than 1.3 × 10 49 erg and 2.4 × 10 48 erg in high-energy neutrinos.…”

“…If this jet is not energetic enough to break through the remaining outer layers of the star and stalls sufficiently far below the photosphere, the high-energy neutrinos produced by accelerated protons would be the only messengers able to escape (Murase et al 2016;Senno et al 2016;He et al 2018;Guetta et al 2020;Fasano et al 2021) and, in principle, could be observed by IceCube. The contribution of CC-SNe to the diffuse neutrino flux detected by IceCube has recently been explored in Abbasi (2023). From the stacking analysis performed using the data recorded by the IceCube Neutrino Observatory, no significant temporal and spatial correlation between neutrinos and SNe was found (Abbasi 2023).…”

“…The contribution of CC-SNe to the diffuse neutrino flux detected by IceCube has recently been explored in Abbasi (2023). From the stacking analysis performed using the data recorded by the IceCube Neutrino Observatory, no significant temporal and spatial correlation between neutrinos and SNe was found (Abbasi 2023). The search for high-energy neutrinos from SN PS16cgx was equally unsuccessful (Pan-STARRS Collaboration et al 2019).…”

Searching for high-energy neutrinos from the most luminous supernovae with the IceCube Neutrino Observatory

“…The signal temporal PDF for a source 𝑗 is taken as uniform over the emission time of the source. Similarly to previous analyses [11], the signal energy PDF is an unbroken power law with spectral index 𝛾. The spatial component of the signal PDF is a circular, two-dimensional, Gaussian ditribution evaluated on the angular separation between the neutrino direction and the source position.…”

“…Among these are tidal disruption events [9], choked-jet supernovae (core-collapse supernovae of type Ib and Ic) and interacting supernovae (core-collapse supernovae of type IIn and superluminous supernovae) [10]. A previous search for neutrinos from core-collapse supernovae with IceCube has not found any excess signal from such a population [11]. Some supernovae belong to the category of shock-powered transients, primarily observed in the optical bands [12].…”