Tomographic constraints on the high-energy cosmic neutrino emission rate

Journal article

Despite growing efforts to find the sources of high-energy neutrinos measured by IceCube, the bulk of the neutrinos remain with unknown origins. In this work, we aim to constrain the emissivity of cosmic high-energy neutrinos from extragalactic sources through their correlation with the large-scale structure. We use cross-correlations between the IceCube 10-year data set and tomographic maps of the galaxy overdensity to place constraints on the bias-weighted high-energy neutrino emissivity out to redshift . We test two different models to describe the evolution of neutrino emissivity with redshift, a power-law model , and a model tracking the star formation history, assuming a simple power-law model for the energy injection spectrum. We also consider a non-parametric reconstruction of the astrophysical neutrino emissivity as a function of redshift. We do not find any significant correlation, with our strongest results corresponding to a deviation with respect to a model with zero signal. We use our measurements to place upper bounds on the bias-weighted astrophysical high-energy neutrino emission rate as a function of redshift for different source models. This analysis provides a new probe to test extragalactic neutrino source models. With future neutrino and galaxy data sets, we expect the constraining and detection power of this type of analysis to increase.

Authors: Ureña, AG; Urban, F; Alonso, D

• Publication status: Published
• Peer review status: Peer reviewed
• Publisher: Oxford University Press
• Journal: Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society
• Volume: 546
• Issue: 3
• Article number: stag084
• Publication date: 2026-01-14
• Acceptance date: 2025-12-28
• DOI: 10.1093/mnras/stag084
• EISSN: 1365-2966
• ISSN: 0035-8711
• Language: English
• Keywords: astroparticle physics; neutrinos; methods: statistical; large-scale structure of Universe