High-energy cosmic neutrinos from spine-sheath BL lac jets

Abstract

We recently proposed that structured (spine-sheath) jets associated with BL Lac objects could offer a suitable environment for the production of the extragalactic high-energy (E > 100 TeV) neutrino recently revealed by IceCube. Our previous analysis was limited to low-power BL Lac objects. We extend our preliminary study to the entire BL Lac population, assuming that the entire diffuse emission is accounted for by these sources. The neutrino output from a single source depends on a relatively large number of parameters. However, for several of them we have constraints coming from observations and previous application of the structured jet model to blazar and radiogalaxy emission. The observed neutrino spectrum then fixes the remaining free parameters. We assume that the power of cosmic rays as well as the radiative luminosity of the sheath depends linearly on the jet power. In turn, we assume that the latter is well traced by the γ-ray luminosity. We exploit the BL Lac γ -ray luminosity function and its cosmic evolution as recently inferred from Fermi-LAT data to derive the expected neutrino cumulative intensity from the entire BL Lac population. When considering only the low-power BL Lacs, a large cosmic ray power for each source is required to account for the neutrino flux. Instead, if BL Lacs of all powers produce neutrinos, the power demand decreases, and the required cosmic ray power becomes of the same order of the radiative jet power. In our scheme, the maximum energy of cosmic rays is constrained to be ≲ few PeV by the lack of events above few PeV. Although such a value is obtained through a fine-tuning with the data, we show that it could be possibly related to the equilibrium between cooling and acceleration processes for high-energy cosmic rays.We also discuss the prospects for the direct association of IceCube events with BL Lacs, providing an estimate of the expected counts for the most promising sources.