Search for Spatial Correlations of Neutrinos with Ultra-high-energy Cosmic Rays

THE PIERRE AUGER COLLABORATION (P. HANSEN PERTENECE A LA COLABORACION-ORDEN ALFABETICO)

ASTROPHYSICAL JOURNAL

IOP PUBLISHING LTD

Lugar: Londres; Año: 2022

0004-637X

For several decades, the origin of ultra-high-energy cosmic rays (UHECRs) has been an unsolved question of high-energy astrophysics. One approach for solving this puzzle is to correlate UHECRs with high-energy neutrinos, sinceneutrinos are a direct probe of hadronic interactions of cosmic rays and are not deflected by magnetic fields. In this paper,we present three different approaches for correlating the arrival directions of neutrinos with the arrival directions ofUHECRs. The neutrino data are provided by the IceCube Neutrino Observatory and ANTARES, while the UHECR datawith energies above ∼50 EeV are provided by the Pierre Auger Observatory and the Telescope Array. All experimentsprovide increased statistics and improved reconstructions with respect to our previous results reported in 2015. The firstanalysis uses a high-statistics neutrino sample optimized for point-source searches to search for excesses of neutrinoclustering in the vicinity of UHECR directions. The second analysis searches for an excess of UHECRs in the direction ofthe highest-energy neutrinos. The third analysis searches for an excess of pairs of UHECRs and highest-energy neutrinos