Prospects for identifying the sources of the Galactic cosmic rays with IceCube

TL;DR

This paper evaluates IceCube's potential to detect neutrinos from Galactic cosmic-ray sources, demonstrating that high-energy neutrino observations could confirm supernova remnants as cosmic-ray accelerators.

Contribution

It provides a quantitative analysis showing IceCube can identify neutrino signals from Galactic sources, confirming their role in cosmic-ray acceleration.

Findings

IceCube can detect neutrinos from supernova remnants

Neutrino signals above 30 TeV are most indicative

Correlation between Milagro and IceCube maps can be established within years

Abstract

We quantitatively address whether IceCube, a kilometer-scale neutrino detector under construction at the South Pole, can observe neutrinos pointing back at the accelerators of the Galactic cosmic rays. The photon flux from candidate sources identified by the Milagro detector in a survey of the TeV sky is consistent with the flux expected from a typical cosmic-ray generating supernova remnant interacting with the interstellar medium. We show here that IceCube can provide incontrovertible evidence of cosmic-ray acceleration in these sources by detecting neutrinos. We find that the signal is optimally identified by specializing to events with energies above 30 TeV where the atmospheric neutrino background is low. We conclude that evidence for a correlation between the Milagro and IceCube sky maps should be conclusive after several years.