Speaker
Description
The annoucement by the IceCube collaboration of a 4.2σ excess of high-energy neutrinos (1–10 TeV) spatially associated with the Seyfert 2 galaxy NGC 1068 marked a breakthrough in multi-messenger astrophysics. Recent evidence also suggests correlations with other Seyfert galaxies (e.g., NGC 4151, NGC 7469), indicating non-jetted active galactic nuclei (AGN) as significant contributors to the extragalactic neutrino flux. The striking mismatch between neutrino and γ-ray emissions in NGC 1068 points to neutrino production in a compact, photon-opaque region, most plausibly the turbulent corona of its supermassive black hole (Murase et al. 2020). Proton acceleration up to 10–100 TeV in such magnetized, highly turbulent environments thus emerges as a key mechanism to explain these observations.
We discuss here our efforts to understand this signal, from the microphysical picture of stochastic particle acceleration in turbulence to its implementation in a sophisticated numerical framework modeling the relevant non-linear kinetic processes. This includes the interplay between turbulent dissipation and acceleration, radiative and hadronic losses and transport processes in the corona. This framework makes use of the AM3 radiative solver (Klinger et al. 2024).
Our models reproduce the IceCube neutrino signal for NGC 1068 and predict spectral shapes that can constrain coronal properties and acceleration mechanisms. This work provides a powerful tool to explore multi-messenger emission across diverse astrophysical environments, bridging gaps between particle-in-cell simulations and macroscopic source modeling.