AGN Variability and HEAN in the age of VRO
- Cyril Creque-Sarbinowski, Johns Hopkins University
Over the next ten years, the Vera C. Rubin Observatory (VRO) will observe ∼10 million active galactic nuclei (AGN) with a regular and high cadence. During this time, the intensities of most of these AGN will vary stochastically. Moreover, these fluctuations may also be connected to the high-energy astrophysical neutrino (HEAN) flux observed by IceCube. In this talk, I explore the prospects to quantify these fluctuations with VRO-measurements of AGN light curves and also evaluate the capacity of VRO, in tandem with various current and upcoming neutrino telescopes, to establish AGN as HEAN emitters. I find that AGN variability measurements will be so precise as to allow the AGN to be separated into up to ∼ 10 different correlation-timescale bins. I also show that if the correlation time varies as some power of the luminosity, the normalization and power-law index of that relation will be determined to O(10^{−4}%). Finally, I find that it may be possible to detect AGN contributions at the ~ 3sigma level to the HEAN flux even if these AGN contribute only ~10% of the HEAN flux.