On the origin of ~ 100 TeV neutrinos from the Seyfert galaxy NGC 7469

Abstract

The origin of TeV-PeV neutrinos detected by IceCube remains largely unknown. The most significant individual neutrino source is the close-by Seyfert galaxy NGC 1068 at 4.2$σ$ level with a soft spectral index. Another notable candidate is the Seyfert galaxy NGC 7469, which has been recently proposed as a potential neutrino emitter. The likelihood fit of the IceCube data for this source returned a very hard spectral index of ~ 1.9 and the excess is dominated by two high-energy events, issued as two neutrino alerts IC220424A and IC230416A. The energies of the two neutrinos are estimated to be 100-200 TeV, implying a maximum proton energy > 2 PeV, significantly higher than that in NGC 1068. The lack of lower-energy neutrinos from NGC 7469 also suggests a neutrino spectrum harder than that of NGC 1068. In this paper, we analyze the Fermi-LAT observations of NGC 7469, which yield non-detection. By requiring the cascade flux accompanying neutrino production not to exceed the upper limit of the GeV flux, the size of the neutrino-emitting region can be constrained when the neutrino flux takes a high value of the allowed range. We suggest that protons are accelerated to PeV energies via turbulence or magnetic reconnection in the corona of NGC 7469 and interact with OUV photons from the accretion disk and X-rays from the corona through the $pγ$ process, producing neutrinos with energy of 100-200 TeV. In the turbulence acceleration scenario, the required maximum proton energy can be achieved with a magnetization parameter close to unity ($σ\sim 1$), while in the reconnection scenario, a magnetization parameter with $σ\sim 10$ is needed. In both scenarios, a pair dominated composition for the corona is preferred. The difference in the neutrino spectrum between NGC 7469 and NGC 1068 could be due to a different magnetization despite that they belong to the same type of AGN.