Investigating the correlations between IceCube high-energy neutrinos and Fermi-LAT -ray observations. II
Phys. Rev. D 112, 103013 – Published 10 November, 2025
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1103/wm72-25tq
Abstract
Given that gamma rays with energies larger than TeV are severely absorbed by background radiation fields, for many extragalactic sources, the GeV–TeV gamma-ray observations are the messengers that are closest in energy to the TeV–PeV neutrinos observed by IceCube. Investigating whether there is a correlation between the gamma-ray and neutrino observations can help us identify high-energy neutrino sources and determine which sources are the main contributors to the all-sky diffuse neutrino flux of IceCube. In previous work, we have already studied the possible gamma-neutrino correlations by analyzing 10 years of IceCube public muon-track data. In this work, we further investigate such correlations by employing the IceCube -value sky map of the scan for point sources. We examine the spatial associations of hot spots in the neutrino sky map with various gamma-ray source samples: the third Fermi-LAT catalog of high-energy sources (3FHL), LAT 14-year source catalog, the fourth catalog of active galactic nuclei, and subsets of these samples. Among all the samples, the 3FHL sample shows a possible correlation with the neutrino hot spots with a pretrial value of (), corresponding to a posttrial significance of . However, this is found to be caused by three already known neutrino sources or source candidates: NGC 1068, TXS , and PKS .