Generation of TeV Photons by PeV Neutrinos in Dense Astrophysical Environments
Abstract
Recent observations by IceCube and KM3Net of PeV-scale ultra-high-energy (UHE) neutrinos, together with detections of TeV-PeV photons from various sources such as the Crab Nebula, the Galactic Center, and gamma-ray burst by ground-based observatories including Tibet ASγ, MAGIC, Carpet-3, and LHAASO, point to the existence of extreme astrophysical environments capable of accelerating particles to ultra-high energies. These findings motivate investigations of possible connections between UHE neutrinos and photons in such environments. Theoretically, dense regions surrounding compact objects can efficiently produce UHE neutrinos. In this work, we calculate the production of UHE photons from neutrino-nucleon interactions, and note that if these interactions occur in the outer, optically thin regions of dense environments, the resulting photons could potentially be observed. In our model, an incident neutrino scatters off a nucleon, generating secondary partons that hadronize into pions and subsequently decay into UHE photons. We calculate the resulting photon energy spectra and find that for incident (anti)neutrinos with energies above 1 PeV, the probability of producing photons with energies exceeding 1 TeV is greater than 13%. As a concrete application, we show that this mechanism can quantitatively account for the preburst TeV photons observed in GRB 221009A, providing a natural explanation for both their energies and lead times. These findings establish a plausible mechanism linking UHE neutrino events to gamma-ray observations, providing new insights into hadronic processes in extreme astrophysical environments and supporting multi-messenger astronomy studies.
Versions
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BibTeX
@misc{wang2026generation,
title = {{Generation of TeV Photons by PeV Neutrinos in Dense Astrophysical Environments}},
author = {Jun-Chen Wang and Hanlin Song and Hao Li and Jie Zhu and Bo-Qiang Ma},
howpublished = {arXiv},
year = {2026},
month = sep,
doi = {10.48550/arxiv.2608.21266},
eprint = {2608.21266},
archivePrefix = {arXiv},
url = {https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.21266},
note = {CC BY 4.0},
}
RIS
TY - UNPB
TI - Generation of TeV Photons by PeV Neutrinos in Dense Astrophysical Environments
AU - Jun-Chen Wang
AU - Hanlin Song
AU - Hao Li
AU - Jie Zhu
AU - Bo-Qiang Ma
PY - 2026
DA - 2026/09/11
PB - arXiv
DO - 10.48550/arxiv.2608.21266
UR - https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.21266
AB - Recent observations by IceCube and KM3Net of PeV-scale ultra-high-energy (UHE) neutrinos, together with detections of TeV-PeV photons from various sources such as the Crab Nebula, the Galactic Center, and gamma-ray burst by ground-based observatories including Tibet ASγ, MAGIC, Carpet-3, and LHAASO, point to the existence of extreme astrophysical environments capable of accelerating particles to ultra-high energies. These findings motivate investigations of possible connections between UHE neutrinos and photons in such environments. Theoretically, dense regions surrounding compact objects can efficiently produce UHE neutrinos. In this work, we calculate the production of UHE photons from neutrino-nucleon interactions, and note that if these interactions occur in the outer, optically thin regions of dense environments, the resulting photons could potentially be observed. In our model, an incident neutrino scatters off a nucleon, generating secondary partons that hadronize into pions and subsequently decay into UHE photons. We calculate the resulting photon energy spectra and find that for incident (anti)neutrinos with energies above 1 PeV, the probability of producing photons with energies exceeding 1 TeV is greater than 13%. As a concrete application, we show that this mechanism can quantitatively account for the preburst TeV photons observed in GRB 221009A, providing a natural explanation for both their energies and lead times. These findings establish a plausible mechanism linking UHE neutrino events to gamma-ray observations, providing new insights into hadronic processes in extreme astrophysical environments and supporting multi-messenger astronomy studies.
ER -