Estimating the neutrino flux from choked gamma-ray bursts

The strong constraints from the Fermi-LAT data on the isotropic gamma-ray background suggest that the neutrinos observed by IceCube might possibly come from sources that are hidden to gamma-ray observations. A possibility recently discussed in the literature is that neutrinos may come from jets of collapsing massive stars which fail to break out of the stellar envelope, and for this reason they are known as choked jets, or choked Gamma-Ray Bursts (GRBs). In this paper, we estimate the neutrino flux and spectrum expected from these sources, focusing on Type II SNe. We perform detailed calculations of pγ interactions, accounting for all the neutrino production channels and scattering angles. We provide predictions of expected event rates for operating neutrino telescopes, such as ANTARES and IceCube, as well as for the future generation telescope KM3NeT. We find that for GRB energies channeled into protons spanning between ∼ 1051–1053 erg, choked GRBs may substantially contribute to the observed astrophysical neutrino flux, if their local rate is ∼ 80–1 Gpc-3yr-1 respectively.