Galactic gamma-ray and neutrino emission from interacting cosmic-ray nuclei

Abstract

We present a study of the expectations for very-high-energy (VHE) to ultra-high-energy (UHE) gamma-ray and neutrino emission from interacting cosmic rays in our Galaxy as well as a comparison to the latest results for the Galactic UHE diffuse emission. We demonstrate the importance of properly accounting for both the mixed cosmic-ray composition and the gamma-ray absorption. We adopt the wounded-nucleon model of nucleus interactions and provide parameterisations of the resulting gamma-ray and neutrino production. Nucleon shielding due to clustering inside nuclei is shown to have a measurable effect on the production of gamma rays and is particularly evident close to breaks and cutoffs in mixed-composition particle spectra. The change in composition around the `knee' in the cosmic ray spectrum has a noticeable impact on the diffuse neutrino and gamma-ray emission spectra. We show that current and near-future detectors can probe these differences in the key energy range from 10 TeV to 1 PeV, testing the paradigm of the universality of the cosmic ray spectrum and composition throughout the Galaxy.

17 pages, 12 figures, accepted for publication by A&A

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Cited by in corpus (9)

• Measurement of ultra-high-energy diffuse gamma-ray emission of the Galactic plane from 10 TeV to 1 PeV with LHAASO-KM2A
• Galactic diffuse gamma rays meet the PeV frontier
• A deep spectromorphological study of the $\gamma$-ray emission surrounding the young massive stellar cluster Westerlund 1
• Probing the Particle Spectrum of Nature with Evaporating Black Holes
• Diffuse Emission of Galactic High-Energy Neutrinos from a Global Fit of Cosmic Rays
• Galactic diffuse gamma-ray emission from GeV to PeV energies in light of up-to-date cosmic ray measurements
• Where are Milky Way's Hadronic PeVatrons?
• Massive Star Clusters as sources of high-energy gamma radiation
• Selected results from IceCube