The Case for Black Hole Jets as Ultra-High-Energy Neutrino Sources
Speaker
Date
Time
Place
Room 7S1 (Cosmology Hall)
Abstract
The IceCube neutrino observatory detects a flux of high-energy cosmic neutrinos. After a decade of operation, observations increasingly point to active galactic nuclei (AGN) as the most promising sources. In this talk, I give an overview of recent developments in numerical modeling of active black hole jets, especially the powerful sub-class of blazars. I explain why state-of-the-art models struggle to describe multi-messenger observations, and present new alternatives to these models. I show that the physics of AGN jets makes them promising sources of ultra-high energy neutrinos. These energies are challenging for the current IceCube detector, but will be crucially probed by next-generation experiments.
Biography
Xavier Rodrigues is a postdoc at the European Southern Observatory (ESO) in Garching by Munich, Germany. He obtained his PhD in theoretical physics in 2019 from the Humboldt University of Berlin. Before joining ESO in 2023, he held postdoc positions at the German Electron Synchrotron (DESY, in Zeuthen by Berlin) and at the Ruhr University of Bochum, Germany. His research focuses on numerical modeling of cosmic-ray interactions in active galaxies, shedding light on hotly debated multi-messenger observations.