We investigate whether the recent ultra-high energy (UHE) neutrino events
detected at the IceCube neutrino observatory could come from the decay of
charmed mesons produced within the mildly relativistic jets of supernova-like
astrophysical sources. We demonstrate that the 5.7σ excess of neutrinos
observed by IceCube in the energy range 30 TeV--2 PeV can be explained by a
diffuse flux of neutrinos produced in such slow-jet supernovae, using the
values of astrophysical and QCD parameters within the theoretical uncertainties
associated with neutrino production from charmed meson decay in astrophysical
sources. We discuss the theoretical uncertainties inherent in the evaluation of
charm production in high energy hadronic collisions, as well as the
astrophysical uncertainties associated with slow-jet supernova sources. The
proton flux within the source, and therefore also the produced neutrino flux,
is cut off at around a few PeV, when proton cooling processes become dominant
over proton acceleration. This directly explains the sudden drop in event rates
at energies above a few PeV. We incorporate the effect of energy dependence in
the spectrum-weighted charm production cross-section and show that this has a
very significant effect on the shape, magnitude and cut-off energies for the
neutrino flux.Comment: 5 pages, 3 figure