Speaker
Description
AGN disks may contain a population of embedded stellar-mass black holes with accretion rates limited by feedback mechanisms such as winds or jets. Here, we consider the potential for such winds to serve as sites of particle acceleration and TeV - PeV neutrino production. We employ a simple Shakura-Sunyaev AGN disk model harboring a population of embedded stellar-mass black holes. These black holes accrete material at a super-Eddington rate and launch sub-relativistic, radiation-driven winds, forming a standing termination shock within the AGN disk material. Upon encountering the shock, protons in the wind can be accelerated up to $\sim 10^{16}$ eV. The accelerated protons cool through hadronic interactions with the dense gas at the shock, producing pions, which in turn decay to TeV - PeV neutrinos and gamma-rays. We evaluate the total neutrino emission that may be produced by the collective population of AGN, taking into account cosmological AGN mass and luminosity distributions, as well as the radial distribution of black holes embedded in AGN disks. We find that neutrino emission from such embedded black holes could comprise a significant portion of the diffuse neutrino flux observed by IceCube.