Physical origin of individual blazar–neutrino associations

Determine whether individual associations between active galactic nuclei and high-energy neutrino events are caused by physical processes or arise from chance positional coincidences.

Background

The paper studies six blazars that are spatially consistent with well-reconstructed IceCube high-energy neutrino events and have unique gamma-ray counterparts. It combines multifrequency observations with lepto-hadronic emission models to assess whether the sources can plausibly produce the observed neutrinos.

Although the modeling finds that the candidate blazars can produce neutrino rates compatible with individual IceCube events in several cases, the analysis does not establish whether the observed associations are physical or statistical. Consequently, distinguishing genuine source associations from chance coincidences remains unresolved.