Erratum: Neutrino and pair creation in reconnection-powered coronae of accreting black holes

A ubiquitous feature of accreting black hole systems is their hard X-ray emission which is thought to be produced through Comptonization of soft photons by electrons and positrons in the vicinity of the black hole, in a region with optical depth of order unity. The origin and composition of this Comptonizing region, known as the corona, is a matter open for debate. In this paper we investigate the role of relativistic protons accelerated in black-hole magnetospheric current sheets for the pair enrichment and neutrino emission of AGN coronae. Our model has two free parameters, namely the proton plasma magnetization σₚ, which controls the peak energy of the neutrino spectrum, and the Eddington ratio λEdd (defined as the ratio between X-ray luminosity LX and Eddington luminosity LEdd), which controls the amount of energy transferred to secondary particles. For sources with λEdd λEdd, crit (where λEdd, crit ~ 10⁻¹ for σₚ=10⁵ or ~ 10⁻² for σₚ=10⁷), proton-photon interactions and γ γ annihilation produce enough secondary pairs to achieve Thomson optical depths τT ~ 0.1-10. Additionally, we find that the neutrino luminosity scales as L²X/LEdd for λEdd λEdd, crit, while it is proportional to LX for higher λEdd values. We apply our model to four Seyfert galaxies, including NGC 1068, and discuss our results in light of recent IceCube observations.