Neutrinos from Cosmic Ray Accelerators in the Cygnus Region of the Galaxy

Abstract

While supernova remnants have been identified as the most likely sources of the galactic cosmic rays, no conclusive observational evidence for this association exists. We show here that IceCube has the possibility of producing incontrovertible evidence by detecting neutrinos produced by the cosmic ray beam interacting with the hydrogen in the vicinity of the supernova shock expanding into the interstellar medium. We show that the observational information on gamma ray fluxes from the Cygnus region, although limited, is sufficient to pinpoint the expected event rate of the neutrinos associated with a single source of 0.5 Crab at the TeV level to within a factor of two, between 2 and 3.8 neutrinos per year. Finally, we note that recent gamma-ray observations reveal the presence of at least three and possibly up to eight such sources, raising the possibility of seeing more than 10 neutrinos per year from these sources alone.

arXiv commentLatex, 16 pages, uses pdproc.sty (included), 7 postscript figures. Talk presented at the XII International Workshop on Neutrino Telescopes, Istituto Veneto di Scienze, Lettere ed Arti, Venice, Italy, March 6-9, 2007. Version with added text and references

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• High-energy neutrinos in the context of multimessenger physics
• On cosmic ray acceleration in supernova remnants and the FERMI/PAMELA data
• Identifying Galactic PeVatrons with Neutrinos
• Prospects for identifying the sources of the Galactic cosmic rays with IceCube
• In Search for Extraterrestrial High Energy Neutrinos
• Prospects for Detecting Galactic Sources of Cosmic Neutrinos with IceCube: An Update
• IceCube Sensitivity for Neutrino Flux from Fermi Blazars in Quiescent States
• Gamma-ray Astronomy with Muons: Sensitivity of IceCube to PeVatrons in the Southern Sky
• IceCube Science
• Cosmic ray backgrounds for dark matter indirect detection
• An R- and I-Band Photometric Variability Survey of the Cygnus OB2 Association
• Multi-messenger Implications of Sub-PeV Diffuse Galactic Gamma-Ray Emission