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 ₏, which controls the peak energy of the neutrino spectrum, and the Eddington ratio ₄₃₃ (defined as the ratio between X-ray luminosity L ₗ and Eddington luminosity L ₄₃₃), which controls the amount of energy transferred to secondary particles. For sources with ₄₃₃ ₄₃₃, ₂ₑ₈ₓ (where ₄₃₃, ₂ₑ₈ₓ 10^-1 for ₏=10⁵ or 10^-2 for ₏=10⁷), proton-photon interactions and annihilation produce enough secondary pairs to achieve Thomson optical depths ₓ 0. 1-10. Additionally, we find that the neutrino luminosity scales as L² ₗ/L ₄₃₃ for ₄₃₃ ₄₃₃, ₂ₑ₈ₓ, while it is proportional to L ₗ for higher ₄₃₃ values. We apply our model to four Seyfert galaxies, including NGC 1068, and discuss our results in light of recent IceCube observations.