Neutrinos from Cosmic Ray Accelerators in the Cygnus Region of the Galaxy

TL;DR

This paper explores IceCube's potential to detect neutrinos from cosmic ray interactions near supernova remnants in the Cygnus region, providing a promising method to confirm their role as galactic cosmic ray sources.

Contribution

It demonstrates that neutrino detection can serve as definitive evidence for supernova remnants being cosmic ray accelerators, with specific event rate predictions based on gamma-ray data.

Findings

Neutrino event rate estimated between 2 and 3.8 per year for a single source.

Multiple sources in Cygnus could yield over 10 neutrinos annually.

Gamma-ray data can constrain neutrino flux predictions.

Abstract

While supernova remnants have been identified as the most likely sources of the galactic cosmic rays, no conclusive observational evidence for this association exists. We show here that IceCube has the possibility of producing incontrovertible evidence by detecting neutrinos produced by the cosmic ray beam interacting with the hydrogen in the vicinity of the supernova shock expanding into the interstellar medium. We show that the observational information on gamma ray fluxes from the Cygnus region, although limited, is sufficient to pinpoint the expected event rate of the neutrinos associated with a single source of 0.5 Crab at the TeV level to within a factor of two, between 2 and 3.8 neutrinos per year. Finally, we note that recent gamma-ray observations reveal the presence of at least three and possibly up to eight such sources, raising the possibility of seeing more than 10 neutrinos per year from these sources alone.