Gamma-ray Astronomy with Muons: Sensitivity of IceCube to PeVatrons in the Southern Sky

Abstract

Northern hemisphere TeV gamma-ray observatories such as Milagro and Tibet AS$\gamma$ have demonstrated the importance of all-sky instruments by discovering previously unidentified sources that may be the PeVatrons producing cosmic rays up to the "knee" in the cosmic ray spectrum. We evaluate the potential of IceCube to identify similar sources in the southern sky by detailing an analytic approach to determine fluxes of muons from TeV gamma-ray showers. We apply this approach to known gamma-ray sources such as supernova remnants. We find that, similar to Milagro, detection is possible in 10 years for point-like PeVatrons with fluxes stronger than several 10^{-11} particles TeV^{-1} cm^{-2} s^{-1}.

27 pages, 13 figures

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Cited by in corpus (1)

• Search for PeV Gamma-Ray Emission from the Southern Hemisphere with 5 Years of Data from the IceCube Observatory