Guaranteed and Prospective Galactic TeV Neutrino Sources

Abstract

Recent observations, particularly from the HESS Collaboration, have revealed rich Galactic populations of TeV gamma-ray sources, including a collection unseen in other wavelengths. Many of these gamma-ray spectra are well measured up to ~10 TeV, where low statistics make observations by air Cerenkov telescopes difficult. To understand these mysterious sources, especially at much higher energies--where a cutoff should eventually appear--new techniques are needed. We point out the following: (1) For a number of sources, it is very likely that pions, and hence TeV neutrinos, are produced; (2) As a general point, neutrinos should be a better probe of the highest energies than gamma rays, due to increasing detector efficiency; and (3) For several specific sources, the detection prospects for km^3 neutrino telescopes are very good, about 1-10 events/year, with low atmospheric neutrino background rates above reasonable energy thresholds. Such signal rates, as small as they may seem, will allow neutrino telescopes to powerfully discriminate between models for the Galactic TeV sources, with important consequences for our understanding of cosmic-ray production.

12 pages, 5 figures; minor changes to match published version

References in corpus (2)

• Physics Reach of High-Energy and High-Statistics IceCube Atmospheric Neutrino Data
• Expected neutrino signal from supernova remnant RX J1713.7-3946 and flavor oscillations

Cited by in corpus (16)

• Enhanced Cosmological GRB Rates and Implications for Cosmogenic Neutrinos
• Study of TeV Neutrinos with Upward Showering Muons in Super-Kamiokande
• An Analysis of Cosmic Neutrinos: Flavor Composition at Source and Neutrino Mixing Parameters
• How precisely neutrino emission from supernova remnants can be constrained by gamma ray observations?
• TeV gamma-rays and neutrinos from photo-disintegration of nuclei in Cygnus OB2
• Dissecting the Cygnus Region with TeV Gamma Rays and Neutrinos
• Prospects for Detecting Neutrino Signals from Annihilating/Decaying Dark Matter to Account for the PAMELA and ATIC results
• Probing new physics with long-lived charged particles produced by atmospheric and astrophysical neutrinos
• Cosmic Neutrinos from the Sources of Galactic and Extragalactic Cosmic Rays
• Neutrinos from Cosmic Ray Accelerators in the Cygnus Region of the Galaxy
• Method to extract the primary cosmic ray spectrum from very high energy gamma-ray data and its application to SNR RX J1713.7-3946
• Production of Neutrinos and Secondary Electrons in Cosmic Sources
• The diffuse GeV-TeV $\gamma$-ray emission of the Cygnus region
• Secondary Photons from High-energy Protons Accelerated in Hypernovae
• Best-Bet Astrophysical Neutrino Sources
• High Energy Astroparticle Physics