Speaker
Description
High-confidence associations of individual neutrinos with individual blazars could be achieved via spatially and temporally coincident detections of photons and high-energy neutrinos (>100 TeV) from short blazar flares. It has been suggested that the current IceCube neutrino detector is sufficiently sensitive to detect neutrinos from such short flares.
We want to test this prediction by calculating the expected number of neutrinos produced in the IceCube detector for the 50 brightest short blazar flares in the sky.
The two blazars 3C 279 and PKS 1510−089 alone account for the 27 highest-ranked flares, while the 50 best-ranked flares are produced by a group of only seven different sources.
We find that the fluence of most individual blazar flares is far too small to yield a substantial Poisson probability for the detection of one or more neutrinos with IceCube.
The integrated fluence of the 50 highest-ranked flares yields only about 50 % of Poisson probability for the detection of a single high-energy neutrino. For the most spectacular short blazar flares, however, Poisson probabilities of up to ∼ 2 % are calculated, so that the possibility of associated neutrino detections in future data unblindings of IceCube and KM3NeT seems reasonable.
