Measurement of Very-high-energy Diffuse Gamma-ray Emissions from the Galactic Plane with LHAASO-WCDA

Abstract

The diffuse Galactic gamma-ray emission is a very important tool used to study the propagation and interaction of cosmic rays in the Milky Way. In this work, we report the measurements of the diffuse emission from the Galactic plane, covering Galactic longitudes from $15^{\circ }$ to $235^{\circ }$ and latitudes from $-5^{\circ }$ to $+5^{\circ }$, in an energy range of 1 TeV to 25 TeV, with the Water Cherenkov Detector Array (WCDA) of the Large High Altitude Air Shower Observatory (LHAASO). After masking the sky regions of known sources, the diffuse emission is detected with $24.6\sigma$ and $9.1\sigma$ significance in the inner Galactic plane and outer Galactic plane, respectively. The WCDA spectra in both regions can be well described by a power-law function, with spectral indices of $-2.67\pm 0.05_{\mathrm{stat}}$ in the inner region and $-2.83\pm 0.19_{\mathrm{stat}}$ in the outer region, respectively. Combined with the Square Kilometer Array (KM2A) measurements at higher energies, a clear softening of the spectrum is found in the inner region, with change of spectral indices by $\sim 0.5$ at a break energy around $30$ TeV. The fluxes of the diffuse emission are higher by a factor of $1.5-2.7$ than the model prediction assuming local CR spectra and the gas column density, which are consistent with those measured by the KM2A. Along Galactic longitude, the spatial distribution of the diffuse emission shows deviation from that of the gas column density. The spectral shape of the diffuse emission are possibly variation in different longitude region. The WCDA measurements bridge the gap between the low-energy measurements by space detectors and the ultra-high-energy observations by LHAASO-KM2A and other experiments. These results suggest that improved modeling of the wide-band diffuse emission is required.

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• A discussion on the origin of the sub-PeV Galactic gamma-ray emission
• An extreme particle accelerator powered by pulsar PSR J1849-0001
• Ultra High Energy Neutrino Event KM3-230213A as a Signal of Electroweak Vacuum Turbulence in Merging Black Hole Binaries
• Leptonic and hadronic models of high-energy nebula around V4641 Sgr
• LHAASO Galactic Plane $\gamma$-rays Strongly Constrain Heavy Dark Matter
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• Particle Astrophysics with High and Ultrahigh Energy Neutrinos
• Search for Diffuse Galactic Neutrinos with the Full ANTARES Telescope Dataset
• Stochastic modelling of cosmic-ray sources for Galactic diffuse emissions
• Cosmic-Ray Mass Composition around the Knee via Principal Component Analysis