Can we detect PeV neutrinos from merging black hole binaries?

Abstract

In the environment of a newly formed black hole, even small amounts of plasma can support a strong magnetic field up to 1011 G in a short time, and protons could be accelerated to ∼1017 eV which is limited by the curvature radiation. In the most optimistic estimation which consider no curvature cooling during the acceleration of protons, the maximum proton energy might be up to ∼1020 eV. After acceleration, in such extreme environment, the dominated energy loss process of proton is through their interaction with the strong magnetic fields, that is, the so-called pB process (Yuan and Shi, 2019). The maximum energy of neutrino produced due to the pB process can reach to ∼1019 eV. In the case of GW150914 detected by Advanced LIGO, the neutrino flux is estimated to be below the detection limit of IceCube. Neutrinos associating with the merging of nearby black hole binary with distance ≲ 5 Mpc could be detected by the current IceCube detector, and the diffuse neutrino background resulting from black hole mergers could be detected by the future IceCube-Gen2.