Search for Spatial Correlations of Neutrinos with Ultra-High-Energy Cosmic Rays

THE ICECUBE COLLABORATION; THE PIERRE AUGER COLLABORATION.; S. J. SCIUTTO; THE TELESCOPE ARRAY COLLABORATION

ASTROPHYSICAL JOURNAL

IOP PUBLISHING LTD

Lugar: Londres; Año: 2022 vol. 934

0004-637X

For several decades, the origin of ultra-high-energy cosmic rays (UHECRs) has been an unsolved question of highenergyastrophysics. One approach for solving this puzzle is to correlate UHECRs with high-energy neutrinos,since neutrinos 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 thearrival directions of UHECRs. The neutrino data are provided by the IceCube Neutrino Observatory andANTARES, while the UHECR data with energies above ∼50 EeV are provided by the Pierre Auger Observatoryand the Telescope Array. All experiments provide increased statistics and improved reconstructions with respect toour previous results reported in 2015. The first analysis uses a high-statistics neutrino sample optimized for pointsourcesearches to search for excesses of neutrino clustering in the vicinity of UHECR directions. The secondanalysis searches for an excess of UHECRs in the direction of the highest-energy neutrinos. The third analysissearches for an excess of pairs of UHECRs and highest-energy neutrinos on different angular scales. None of the analyses have found a significant excess, and previously reported overfluctuations are reduced in significance.Based on these results, we further constrain the neutrino flux spatially correlated with UHECRs.