Clash of the titans: ultra-high energy KM3NeT event versus IceCube data

KM3NeT has reported the detection of a remarkably high-energy through-going muon. Lighting up about a third of the detector, this muon likely originated from a neutrino exceeding 10 PeV in energy. The crucial question we need to answer is where this event comes from and what its source is. Intriguingly, IceCube has been operating with a much larger effective area for a considerably longer time, yet it has not reported neutrinos above 10 PeV. We quantify the tension between the KM3NeT event and the absence of similar high-energy events in IceCube under various assumptions of the origin for the neutrino including the isotropic diffuse flux, cosmogenic flux, and a steady or transient point source. Through a detailed analysis, we determine the most likely neutrino energy to be in the range of 23 – 2400 PeV, and find a tension between the experiments ranging from 3.6 to 3.1 σ for diffuse origins and 2.9 to 2.0 σ for point sources. The lack of observation of high-energy events in IceCube seriously challenges the explanation of this event coming from any known diffuse fluxes. Our results indicate the KM3NeT event is likely the first observation of a new astrophysical source.