Search for a cumulative neutrino flux from 2LAC-blazar populations using 3 years of IceCube data

Blazars are active galactic nuclei with relativistic plasma jets whose symmetry axis is pointing towards Earth. They are a prime source candidate for the production of high-energy neutrinos. This work describes the search for a cumulative neutrino flux from all 862 Fermi-LAT 2LAC blazars and four spectrally defined sub-populations. Selected muon-track events from three years of IceCube data are analyzed with an unbinned likelihood stacking approach. Two different weighting schemes are used to account for the unknown relative flux contributions of each source. Nine of ten tests show slight overfluctuations, none of which are statistically significant. An upper flux limit is calculated constraining the maximal contribution of the 2LAC blazars to the recently discovered diffuse TeV-PeV neutrino flux to be 23% or less assuming the currently favored spectral index for the astrophysical flux of around −2.5 and an equal composition of neutrino flavors arriving at Earth. The results do not require a purely hadronic production of the observed gamma rays and remain valid for moderately harder spectra or smaller sub-populations, e.g. the TeVCat sub-sample, up to a factor of around 2. Additionally, upper limits are calculated for generic power-law spectra and for concrete spectral models of the diffuse neutrino emission of blazar populations. 12 out of 14 of these models are either constrained or excluded. If the largest overfluctuation is interpreted as a physics effect, one finds a soft flux in the 5-10 TeV region that is compatible with gamma-ray observations. Further years of data are already available which makes this scenario testable in the near future. If confirmed, blazars might become the first known extragalactic hadronic acceleration site