TY  - EJOUR
AU  - Karavola, Despina
AU  - Petropoulou, M.
AU  - Fiorillo, Damiano Francesco Giuseppe
AU  - Comisso, L.
AU  - Sironi, L.
TI  - Neutrino and pair creation in reconnection-powered coronae of accreting black holes
IS  - arXiv:2410.12638
M1  - PUBDB-2024-07253
M1  - arXiv:2410.12638
PY  - 2024
N1  - DFGF is supported by the Alexander vonHumboldt Foundation (Germany)
AB  - A ubiquitous feature of accreting black hole systems is their hard X-ray emission which is thought to be produced through Comptonization of soft photons by electrons and positrons in the vicinity of the black hole, in a region with optical depth of order unity. The origin and composition of this Comptonizing region, known as the corona, is a matter open for debate. In this paper we investigate the role of relativistic protons accelerated in black-hole magnetospheric current sheets for the pair enrichment and neutrino emission of AGN coronae. Our model has two free parameters, namely the proton plasma magnetization σ<sub>p</sub>, which controls the peak energy of the neutrino spectrum, and the Eddington ratio λ<sub>Edd</sub> (defined as the ratio between X-ray luminosity L<sub>X</sub> and Eddington luminosity L<sub>Edd</sub>), which controls the amount of energy transferred to secondary particles. For sources with λ<sub>Edd</sub>  >~λ<sub>Edd, crit</sub> (where λ<sub>Edd, crit</sub>  ∼ 10<sup>−1</sup> for σ<sub>p</sub>=10<sup>5</sup> or  ∼ 10<sup>−2</sup> for σ<sub>p</sub>=10<sup>7</sup>), proton-photon interactions and  γγ annihilation produce enough secondary pairs to achieve Thomson optical depths τ<sub>T</sub>  ∼ 0.1−10. Additionally, we find that the neutrino luminosity scales as L<sup>2</sup><sub>X</sub>/L<sub>Edd</sub> for λ<sub>Edd</sub>  <~λ<sub>Edd, crit</sub>, while it is proportional to L<sub>X</sub> for higher λ<sub>Edd</sub> values. We apply our model to four Seyfert galaxies, including NGC 1068, and discuss our results in light of recent IceCube observations.
LB  - PUB:(DE-HGF)25
UR  - https://bib-pubdb1.desy.de/record/618942
ER  -