Prospects for identifying the sources of the Galactic cosmic rays with IceCube
arXiv:0803.0314 · doi:10.1103/PhysRevD.78.063004
Abstract
We quantitatively address whether IceCube, a kilometer-scale neutrino detector under construction at the South Pole, can observe neutrinos pointing back at the accelerators of the Galactic cosmic rays. The photon flux from candidate sources identified by the Milagro detector in a survey of the TeV sky is consistent with the flux expected from a typical cosmic-ray generating supernova remnant interacting with the interstellar medium. We show here that IceCube can provide incontrovertible evidence of cosmic-ray acceleration in these sources by detecting neutrinos. We find that the signal is optimally identified by specializing to events with energies above 30 TeV where the atmospheric neutrino background is low. We conclude that evidence for a correlation between the Milagro and IceCube sky maps should be conclusive after several years.
5 pages, 5 figures; part of the text and some figures have changed, conclusions remain the same; equals journal version
References in corpus (6)
- TeV Gamma-Ray Sources from a Survey of the Galactic Plane with Milagro
- Methods for point source analysis in high energy neutrino telescopes
- Discovery of TeV Gamma-Ray Emission from the Cygnus Region of the Galaxy
- Dissecting the Cygnus Region with TeV Gamma Rays and Neutrinos
- Evidence for TeV gamma ray emission from TeV J2032+4130 in Whipple archival data
- Neutrinos from Cosmic Ray Accelerators in the Cygnus Region of the Galaxy