High-energy neutrinos from shocked circumnuclear material around optically-bright and infrared-only tidal disruption events

Tidal disruption events (TDEs) can launch sub-relativistic outflows that drive shocks into the surrounding circumnuclear material (CNM), providing a natural site for cosmic ray (CR) acceleration and high-energy neutrino production through hadronuclear (pp) interactions. We model this emission for optically bright and infrared (IR)-only TDEs, the latter motivated by a recently identified population of luminous IR transients with weak or absent optical counterparts, consistent with TDEs embedded in dusty, obscured nuclear environments. We semi-analytically compute the shock dynamics, CR acceleration and transport, and neutrino production, including the radiative cooling and compression in dense environments. While optical TDEs remain inefficient pp neutrino sources with comparatively small neutrino yields, radiative compression in dense IR-only TDEs enhances the target density and allows the pp efficiency to approach the calorimetric regime, yielding up to about 10% of the observed diffuse neutrino flux at 100 TeV, given the rate uncertainties. The long-lasting neutrino emission and low individual source yield motivate joint electromagnetically informed stacking searches. We forecast such searches for IceCube, IceCube-Gen2, KM3NeT, and HUNT, and conclude that a future about 30 km cubed neutrino observatory can reach 3σ sensitivity for nearby (z 0.4) IR-only TDEs with multi-year search windows. Growing optical and IR TDE samples can therefore enable population-resolved searches that can test whether dense, obscured nuclear environments are efficient high-energy neutrino sources.