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Neutrino emission and corona heating induced by high-energy proton interactions in Seyfert galaxies

A. Neronov1,2,*, O. Kalashev2, D. V. Semikoz1, D. Savchenko1,3,4, and M. Poleshchuk3

  • *Contact author: andrii.neronov@epfl.ch
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Phys. Rev. D 112, 123032 – Published 19 December, 2025

DOI: https://doi.org/10.1103/4vwj-zwm9

Abstract

Recent detection of very-high-energy neutrino emission from Seyfert type active galactic nuclei (AGN) provides a new insight into the physics of the AGN central engines. We notice that if high-energy protons responsible for neutrino emission are accelerated close to the surface of the accretion disk, the neutrino flux may have no unambiguously identifiable electromagnetic counterpart. This is because the electromagnetic power released in interactions of high-energy protons would only contribute to the heating of the disk surface and corona above the disk, rather than escape from the source. Given that the heat deposited in the corona is released in the hard x-ray range we notice that there still might be an “indirect” electromagnetic counterpart of the neutrino signal: the hard x-ray flux variability may be strongly or weakly correlated with the neutrino flux variations, depending on the importance of the high-energy proton heating in the disk/corona heat balance. If heating by high-energy protons provides a sizable contribution to the overall corona heating rate, the overall flux of diffuse GeV neutrino background from Seyfert galaxies may be comparable to the x-ray background flux and the high-energy tail of this background can provide a sizable contribution to the astrophysical neutrino flux in the TeV band.

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Phys. Rev. D 112, 123032– Published 19 December, 2025
  • Received 1 July 2025
  • Accepted 26 November 2025
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Published by the American Physical Society under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International license. Further distribution of this work must maintain attribution to the author(s) and the published article’s title, journal citation, and DOI.

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