Speakers
Description
Gamma-ray bright blazars are beginning to emerge as a very plausible
source of at least some of the very-high-energy neutrinos detected
by IceCube. Most searches for a correlation between blazars and neutrino
events have so far focused on gamma-ray flaring blazars, motivated by
the fact that very-high-energy gamma-rays are co-produced with neutrinos
if neutrinos are produced through photo-pion interactions of relativistic
protons with dense target photon fields. However, the same target photon
fields also act as a source of gamma-gamma opacity, leading to the development
of electromagnetic cascades. The energy of the co-produced photons is
therefore more likely to emerge in the soft gamma-ray to X-ray regime
instead of high-energy and very-high-energy gamma-rays. We are therefore
conducting a systematic search for a correlation between IceCube Gold and
Bronze alerts and X-ray flaring blazars, utilizing the Swift-XRT blazar
monitoring program. First preliminary results of this search will be
presented.
