Cosmic neutrino fluxes - scaling from UHE gamma rays
Abstract
Gamma ray and neutrino observations are closely coupled: in energetic astrophysical objects where copious production of pions takes place, both gammas and neutrinos are produced. Although γ rays can be produced as a result of either electron or hadron acceleration processes, however, the neutrinos are a clean and unequivocal tracer of the hadrons. Assuming that UHE γ rays are produced by energetic hadrons in astrophysical "beam dumps", it is possible to estimate fluxes of cosmic neutrinos based on the UHE γ ray observations. These estimates are made for Cygnus X-3 and applied to a variety of other sources. Throughout, an attempt is made to parametrize the results so that they can easily be normalized to other detector areas or UHE γ ray fluxes, and so that they can easily be modified for more or less optimistic assumptions about gamma ray attenuation and relative ν - γ intensity levels. © 1990.