Neutrino production through hadronic cascades in AGN accretion disks

Abstract
We consider the production of neutrinos in active galactic nuclei through hadronic cascades. The initial, high-energy nucleons are accelerated in a source above the accretion disk around the central black hole. From the source, the particles diffuse back to the disk and initiate hadronic cascades through pp interactions. The observable output from the cascade is electromagnetic radiation and neutrinos. We use the observed diffuse background x-ray luminosity, which presumably results from this process, to predict the diffuse neutrino flux close to the existing limits from the Frejus experiment. The resulting neutrino spectrum is E2 down to the GeV region. We discuss modifications of this scenario which reduce the predicted neutrino flux.
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