Book Description
Neutrino astronomy began with the detection of solar neutrinos, supernova neutrinos(SN1987A) and more recently the 37 events in IceCube which are very likelyto be an astrophysical origin. The result from IceCube is perhaps the most excitingdiscovery of the year 2013, capping a several decades long search. Variousastrophysical candidates have been proposed as sources of high energy neutrinos,although the origin of the IceCube neutrinos remains a mystery. Gamma-raybursts (GRBs), the most energetic explosions in the universe, were considered asthe most promising source for high energy cosmic rays and neutrinos (with AGNs).However, a previous search of GRB neutrinos by IceCube surprised the GRB communitywith negative results, challenging the simple standard picture of GRBprompt emission which is called the \internal shock" model. In this thesis we givea closer investigation of this model as well as several leading alternative models.With a careful consideration of the particle physics and the model parameters weshow that the previous negative result with GRB neutrinos is not surprising, andonly those models with extremely optimistic parameters can be ruled out. Wepredict that GRBs are unlikely to be the sole sources of the IceCube events, butsignals of GRB neutrinos may be detected in the near future, with the neutrinotelescopes such as IceCube/DeepCore, KM3Net, ARA, ARIANNA, ANITA etc.