NUBLACK – Neutrinos and photons uncover extreme black holes

The KM3NeT neutrino experiment, deployed in the Mediterranean Sea, has recently detected a cosmic neutrino with the highest energy ever observed, exceeding one hundred petaelectronvolts (PeV). This major discovery, led by APC and several international institutes, confirms that a fraction of cosmic neutrinos originates from ultra-high-energy astrophysical sources. Among the most likely candidates are active galactic nuclei (AGN), which host supermassive black holes capable of launching powerful relativistic jets, in which particles such as protons can be accelerated to extreme energies and produce ultra-high-energy neutrinos. The NUBLACK project will test this scenario by developing numerical models of AGN jets, constrained by time-dependent observations covering the entire electromagnetic spectrum. This work opens a new pathway toward a physically grounded interpretation of astrophysical neutrino observations (Q2).

This project’s principal investigator is Matteo CERRUTI (APC, UPCité).