Cumulative Neutrino and Gamma-Ray Backgrounds from Halo and Galaxy Mergers

Abstract

The merger of dark matter halos and the gaseous structures embedded in them, such as proto-galaxies, galaxies, and groups and clusters of galaxies, results in strong shocks that are capable of accelerating cosmic rays (CRs) to $\sim10~\rm PeV$. These shocks will produce high-energy neutrinos and $\gamma$-rays through inelastic $pp$ collisions with ambient gaseous environments. In this work, we study the contributions of these halo mergers to the diffuse neutrino flux measured in IceCube and to the non-blazar portion of the extragalactic $\gamma$-ray background measured by $Fermi$. In order to calculate them, we formulate the redshift dependence of the shock velocity, galactic radius, halo gas content and galactic/intergalactic magnetic fields over the dark matter halo distribution up to a redshift $z=10$. We find that high-redshift mergers contribute a significant amount of the cosmic-ray energy luminosity density, and the resulting neutrino spectra could explain a large part of the observed diffuse neutrino flux above 0.1 PeV up to several PeV. We also show that our model can somewhat alleviate tensions with the extragalactic $\gamma$-ray background. First, since a larger fraction of the CR energy luminosity density comes from high redshifts, the accompanying $\gamma$-rays are more strongly suppressed through $\gamma\gamma$ annihilations with the cosmic microwave background (CMB) and the extragalactic background light (EBL). Second, mildly radiative-cooled shocks may lead to a harder CR spectrum with spectral indices of $1.5\lesssim s\lesssim2.0$. Our study suggests that halo mergers, a fraction of which may also induce starbursts in the merged galaxies, can be promising neutrino emitters without violating the existing $Fermi$ $\gamma$-ray constraints on the non-blazar component of the extragalactic $\gamma$-ray background.