Are Diffuse High Energy Neutrinos from Starburst Galaxies Observable?

Loeb and Waxman have argued that high energy neutrinos from the decay of pions produced in interactions of cosmic rays with interstellar gas in starburst galaxies would be produced with a large enough flux to be observable. Their model is reexamined here and it is shown that the the neutrino flux from starburst galaxies, even given the various assumptions made by them, is more than an order of magnitude lower than the flux which they predict. The predicted neutrino flux would be below the atmospheric neutrino foreground flux at energies below 300 TeV and therefore would be unobservable. PeV neutrinos from starburst galaxies are also unlikely to be detected. Compared with predicted fluxes from other extragalactic high energy neutrino sources, PeV starburst neutrinos would have a flux considerably below that predicted for AGN models.