Fermi Gamma-ray Space Telescope

A new approach for identifying neutrino sources from Fermi catalogs

Ibrahim Safa
(Ali Kheirandish and Francis Halzen)

Abstract:

IceCube has measured an isotropic astrophysical neutrino flux extending to several PeV. The limited statistics in the neutrino data has so far proven challenging for point source searches. Recently reported evidence for a neutrino source (TXS 0506+056) underscores the importance of blazars in the high energy universe, but also suggests that the gamma ray - neutrino relationship is more complicated than previously thought. Fermi has detected a large number of blazars, an unknown subset of which may be neutrino sources. We present a novel technique to search for blazars that improves IceCube’s sensitivity. We revisit assumptions made by previous searches, and relax the direct neutrino - gamma ray correlation requirement, instead focusing on the neutrino signal alone.