Identifying High-energy Neutrino Transients by Neutrino Multiplet-triggered Follow-ups

Abstract

Abstract Transient sources such as supernovae (SNe) and tidal disruption events are candidates of high-energy neutrino sources. However, SNe commonly occur in the universe and a chance coincidence of their detection with a neutrino signal cannot be avoided, which may lead to a challenge of claiming their association with neutrino emission. In order to overcome this difficulty, we propose a search for ∼10–100 TeV multiple neutrino events within a timescale of ∼30 days coming from the same direction, called neutrino multiplets. We show that demanding multiplet detection by a ∼1 km3 neutrino telescope limits the distances of detectable neutrino sources, which enables us to identify source counterparts by multiwavelength observations owing to the substantially reduced rate of the chance coincidence detection of transients. We apply our results by constructing a feasible strategy for optical follow-up observations and demonstrate that wide-field optical telescopes with a ≳4 m dish should be capable of identifying a transient associated with a neutrino multiplet. We also present the resultant sensitivity of multiplet neutrino detection as a function of the released energy of neutrinos and burst rate density. A model of neutrino transient sources with an emission energy greater than a few × 1051 erg and a burst rate rarer than a few ×10−8 Mpc−3 yr−1 is constrained by the null detection of multiplets by a ∼1 km3 scale neutrino telescope. This already disfavors the canonical high-luminosity gamma-ray bursts and jetted tidal disruption events as major sources in the TeV-energy neutrino sky.