Hidden Cosmic-Ray Accelerators as an Origin of TeV-PeV Cosmic Neutrinos

The latest IceCube data suggest that the all-flavor cosmic neutrino flux may be as large as 10⁻⁷ GeV/cm²/s/sr around 30 TeV. We show that, if astrophysical sources of the TeV-PeV neutrinos are transparent to gamma rays with respect to two-photon annihilation, a large fraction of the isotropic diffuse -ray background should originate from hadronic emission of such sources, independently of the production mechanism. Strong tensions with the diffuse gamma-ray data are unavoidable especially in hadronuclear (pp) scenarios. We further show that, if the IceCube neutrinos have a photohadronic (p) origin, the sources are expected to be opaque to 1–100 GeV gamma rays. With these general multimessenger arguments, we find that the latest data may indicate a population of CR accelerators hidden in GeV-TeV gamma rays. In this talk I discuss the possibility that neutrinos may come from jets of collapsing massive stars which fail to break out of the stellar envelope, and for this reason they are known as choked jets, or choked Gamma-Ray Bursts (GRBs). In this talk, I will show the neutrino flux and spectrum expected from these sources, focusing on Type II SNe. I will provide predictions of expected event rates for operating neutrino telescopes, such as ANTARES and IceCube, as well as for the future generation telescope KM3NeT. I will show that for GRB energies channelled into protons spanning between ~ 10⁵¹-10⁵³ erg, choked GRBs may substantially contribute to the observed astrophysical neutrino flux, if their local rate is ~ 80-1 Gpc^-3yr^-1 respectively.

Since these sources are hidden in the gamma-rays, searches for x-ray and UV-ray counterparts from these sources are encouraged.