High-energy neutrinos from shocked circumnuclear material around optically-bright and infrared-only tidal disruption events
Abstract
Tidal disruption events (TDEs) can launch sub-relativistic outflows that drive shocks into the surrounding circumnuclear material (CNM), providing a natural site for cosmic ray (CR) acceleration and high-energy neutrino production through hadronuclear (pp) interactions. We model this emission for optically bright and infrared (IR)-only TDEs, the latter motivated by a recently identified population of luminous IR transients with weak or absent optical counterparts, consistent with TDEs embedded in dusty, obscured nuclear environments. We semi-analytically compute the shock dynamics, CR acceleration and transport, and neutrino production, including the radiative cooling and compression in dense environments. While optical TDEs remain inefficient pp neutrino sources with comparatively small neutrino yields, radiative compression in dense IR-only TDEs enhances the target density and allows the pp efficiency to approach the calorimetric regime, yielding up to ∼ 10% of the observed diffuse neutrino flux at $100$ TeV, given the rate uncertainties. The long-lasting neutrino emission and low individual source yield motivate joint electromagnetically informed stacking searches. We forecast such searches for IceCube, IceCube-Gen2, KM3NeT, and HUNT, and conclude that a future ∼ 30 km3 neutrino observatory can reach 3σ sensitivity for nearby (z ≲ 0.4) IR-only TDEs with multi-year search windows. Growing optical and IR TDE samples can therefore enable population-resolved searches that can test whether dense, obscured nuclear environments are efficient high-energy neutrino sources.
Related
- Numerical Simulations of the interaction between winds from tidal disruption event and supermassive black hole circumnuclear medium
- Search for Neutrinos from Tidal Disruption Events with IceCube
- Optically Selected Superthin Galaxies Remain Thin in the Near-infrared
- Search for High-Energy Neutrinos from Infrared Flares
- A Suppressed Volumetric Rate of High-Luminosity Mid-Infrared Selected Tidal Disruption Events
BibTeX
@misc{mukhopadhyay2026highenergy,
title = {{High-energy neutrinos from shocked circumnuclear material around optically-bright and infrared-only tidal disruption events}},
author = {Mainak Mukhopadhyay and Shigeo S. Kimura and Tatsuya Matsumoto},
howpublished = {arXiv},
year = {2026},
month = oct,
doi = {10.48550/arxiv.2610.00965},
eprint = {2610.00965},
archivePrefix = {arXiv},
url = {https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.00965},
note = {CC BY 4.0},
}
RIS
TY - UNPB
TI - High-energy neutrinos from shocked circumnuclear material around optically-bright and infrared-only tidal disruption events
AU - Mainak Mukhopadhyay
AU - Shigeo S. Kimura
AU - Tatsuya Matsumoto
PY - 2026
DA - 2026/10/01
PB - arXiv
DO - 10.48550/arxiv.2610.00965
UR - https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.00965
AB - Tidal disruption events (TDEs) can launch sub-relativistic outflows that drive shocks into the surrounding circumnuclear material (CNM), providing a natural site for cosmic ray (CR) acceleration and high-energy neutrino production through hadronuclear (pp) interactions. We model this emission for optically bright and infrared (IR)-only TDEs, the latter motivated by a recently identified population of luminous IR transients with weak or absent optical counterparts, consistent with TDEs embedded in dusty, obscured nuclear environments. We semi-analytically compute the shock dynamics, CR acceleration and transport, and neutrino production, including the radiative cooling and compression in dense environments. While optical TDEs remain inefficient pp neutrino sources with comparatively small neutrino yields, radiative compression in dense IR-only TDEs enhances the target density and allows the pp efficiency to approach the calorimetric regime, yielding up to ∼ 10% of the observed diffuse neutrino flux at $100$ TeV, given the rate uncertainties. The long-lasting neutrino emission and low individual source yield motivate joint electromagnetically informed stacking searches. We forecast such searches for IceCube, IceCube-Gen2, KM3NeT, and HUNT, and conclude that a future ∼ 30 km^3 neutrino observatory can reach 3σ sensitivity for nearby (z ≲ 0.4) IR-only TDEs with multi-year search windows. Growing optical and IR TDE samples can therefore enable population-resolved searches that can test whether dense, obscured nuclear environments are efficient high-energy neutrino sources.
ER -