Diffuse neutrino flux from relativistic reconnection in AGN coronae

¹ Department of Physics, National and Kapodistrian University of Athens, University Campus Zografos, GR 15784 Athens, Greece
² Institute of Accelerating Systems & Applications, University Campus Zografos, GR 15784 Athens, Greece
³ Istituto Nazionale di Fisica Nucleare (INFN), Sezione di Napoli, Complesso Universitario di Monte Sant’Angelo, Via Cintia, 80126 Napoli, Italy
⁴ Institute for Astronomy & Astrophysics, National Observatory of Athens, V. Paulou & I. Metaxa, 11532, Greece
⁵ Department of Astronomy and Columbia Astrophysics Laboratory, Columbia University, New York, NY, 10027, USA
⁶ Center for Computational Astrophysics, Flatiron Institute, New York, NY 10010, USA

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Received: 9 December 2025
Accepted: 28 March 2026

Abstract

Context. IceCube observations point to active galactic nuclei (AGNs) as promising contributors to the observed astrophysical neutrino flux. Close to the central black hole, protons can be accelerated through magnetic reconnection to very high energies and subsequently interact with abundant X-ray photons in the source, leading to neutrino production.

Aims. We investigate whether the diffuse neutrino flux observed by IceCube can originate, via proton acceleration, in reconnection-powered coronae of non-jetted AGNs.

Methods. We created a library of neutrino spectral templates over a large grid of values for the three key model parameters: the proton plasma magnetization of the corona σ_p, the X-ray coronal luminosity, and the black hole mass. Synchrotron cooling of pions and muons plays a significant role due to the large coronal magnetic fields. To infer the diffuse neutrino flux, we coupled the single-source model with a mock AGN catalog consistent with the observed X-ray and mid-infrared AGN samples at redshifts z = 0 − 4.

Results. The coronal emission satisfactorily explains the most recent IceCube measurements of the diffuse neutrino flux up to energies of ∼1 PeV, provided that ∼10% of the AGN coronae have σ_p ∼ 10⁵, while the rest are distributed over a range of lower magnetizations. Coronal emission is suppressed at higher energies by pion and muon cooling so that another population is required, with jetted AGNs being strong candidates.