Speaker
Description
The production of high-energy neutrinos, accompanied by a flux of high-energy gamma rays, is attributed to hadronic interactions within cosmic accelerators. Besides TXS 0506+056, no other gamma-ray sources have been identified as neutrino emitters. Instead, sources opaque to gamma rays are emerging as the most likely source of IceCube neutrinos. Active Galactic Nuclei (AGN) with obscured nuclei fit this picture with neutrino emission from NGC 1068 and NGC 4151. Theoretical models of AGN predict that the gamma rays undergo further interactions and cascade down into MeV gamma rays or hard X-rays. This is supported by the observed excess of neutrinos from hard X-ray-detected AGN. Compton-thick AGN are highly obscured from the presence of dense gas, dust and photons that act as targets for interactions making them potential emitters of neutrinos. We present a search for high-energy neutrinos from a catalog of Compton-thick AGN detected in the hard X-ray regime by NuSTAR using a combined dataset of neutrinos from IceCube.
