Little Red Dots as Shock-Powered High-Energy Neutrino Sources
Abstract
Little Red Dots (LRDs) are compact, high-redshift sources whose physical nature remains uncertain. Their optical spectra bear many similarities to Type IIn supernovae (SNe IIn), motivating a scenario in which their emission is powered by shocks interacting with dense surrounding material. We investigate whether such interactions can power LRDs and contribute to the diffuse high-energy neutrino intensity measured by IceCube. In our simplified model, a fast central-engine outflow drives a shock through dense surrounding material before stalling near the LRD photosphere, while some material continues to flow through the shock. We explore parameter ranges motivated by SNe IIn and the observed and inferred properties of LRDs, finding solutions with shock luminosities from 2.2e43 to 3.5e44 erg/s. Using an analytical framework for cosmic-ray acceleration and hadronic interactions in dense shock environments, we calculate the resulting high-energy neutrino emission and integrate it over the cosmological LRD population. For our fiducial SNe IIn-based cosmic-ray parameters, the average predicted contribution below 2e5 GeV increases from about 0.2% for the lowest-luminosity quintile to about 2% for the highest-luminosity quintile, while an illustrative higher-efficiency case reaches about 13% of the IceCube diffuse neutrino intensity. The incompleteness of the current LRD census and uncertainties in their physical nature limit constraints on the cosmic-ray parameters and the distribution of L_s. Larger LRD samples, together with improved physical models and a full population-synthesis study, will be required to constrain the total LRD contribution to the diffuse neutrino background.
Related
- KM3NeT/ARCA stacking search for high-energy neutrino point sources: the case of ultra-luminous infrared galaxies and blazars
- Spectral Appearance of Self-gravitating Disks Powered by Stellar Objects: Universal Effective Temperature in the Optical Continuum and Application to Little Red Dots
- Numerical shock broadening and supernova neutrino conversion: implications for DUNE
- Non-LTE radiative transfer models of very luminous sources and their applicability to little red dots, quasi-stars, and similar objects
- Time-Integrated Searches for Sub-TeV Neutrino Sources with IceCube-DeepCore
BibTeX
@misc{mera2026little,
title = {{Little Red Dots as Shock-Powered High-Energy Neutrino Sources}},
author = {Tyco Mera and Chris Ashall and Shunsaku Horiuchi and Rohan Naidu and Kyle Medler and Peter Hoeflich},
howpublished = {arXiv},
year = {2026},
month = aug,
doi = {10.48550/arxiv.2608.28975},
eprint = {2608.28975},
archivePrefix = {arXiv},
url = {https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.28975},
note = {CC BY 4.0},
}
RIS
TY - UNPB
TI - Little Red Dots as Shock-Powered High-Energy Neutrino Sources
AU - Tyco Mera
AU - Chris Ashall
AU - Shunsaku Horiuchi
AU - Rohan Naidu
AU - Kyle Medler
AU - Peter Hoeflich
PY - 2026
DA - 2026/08/29
PB - arXiv
DO - 10.48550/arxiv.2608.28975
UR - https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.28975
AB - Little Red Dots (LRDs) are compact, high-redshift sources whose physical nature remains uncertain. Their optical spectra bear many similarities to Type IIn supernovae (SNe IIn), motivating a scenario in which their emission is powered by shocks interacting with dense surrounding material. We investigate whether such interactions can power LRDs and contribute to the diffuse high-energy neutrino intensity measured by IceCube. In our simplified model, a fast central-engine outflow drives a shock through dense surrounding material before stalling near the LRD photosphere, while some material continues to flow through the shock. We explore parameter ranges motivated by SNe IIn and the observed and inferred properties of LRDs, finding solutions with shock luminosities from 2.2e43 to 3.5e44 erg/s. Using an analytical framework for cosmic-ray acceleration and hadronic interactions in dense shock environments, we calculate the resulting high-energy neutrino emission and integrate it over the cosmological LRD population. For our fiducial SNe IIn-based cosmic-ray parameters, the average predicted contribution below 2e5 GeV increases from about 0.2% for the lowest-luminosity quintile to about 2% for the highest-luminosity quintile, while an illustrative higher-efficiency case reaches about 13% of the IceCube diffuse neutrino intensity. The incompleteness of the current LRD census and uncertainties in their physical nature limit constraints on the cosmic-ray parameters and the distribution of L_s. Larger LRD samples, together with improved physical models and a full population-synthesis study, will be required to constrain the total LRD contribution to the diffuse neutrino background.
ER -