Diffuse flux of galactic neutrinos and gamma rays

Abstract

We calculate the fluxes of neutrinos and gamma rays from interactions of cosmic rays with interstellar matter in our galaxy. We use EPOS-LHC, SIBYLL and GHEISHA to obtain the yield of these particles in proton, helium and iron collisions at kinetic energies between 1 and 10^8 GeV, and we correlate the cosmic ray density with the mean magnetic field strength in the disk and the halo of our galaxy. We find that at E>1 PeV the fluxes depend very strongly on the cosmic-ray composition, whereas at 1-5 GeV the main source of uncertainty is the cosmic-ray spectrum out of the heliosphere. We show that the diffuse flux of galactic neutrinos becomes larger than the conventional atmospheric one at E>1 PeV, but that at all IceCube energies it is 4 times smaller than the atmospheric flux from forward-charm decays.

14 pages, version to appear in JCAP