Section on Supernova remnants and cosmic rays of the White Paper on the Status and Future of Ground-based Gamma-ray Astronomy

TL;DR

This paper reviews the current state and future prospects of ground-based gamma-ray astronomy in studying supernova remnants and cosmic rays, emphasizing the importance of spatially resolved observations for understanding particle acceleration.

Contribution

It provides a comprehensive overview of past and current efforts, and discusses how future experiments can advance understanding of relativistic particle acceleration in SNRs.

Findings

Current observations have identified shell-type SNRs and diffuse cosmic-ray emission.

Future gamma-ray experiments will enable detailed spatial studies of particle acceleration.

Understanding SNRs will shed light on fundamental astrophysical processes of particle acceleration.

Abstract

This is a report on the findings of the SNR/cosmic-ray working group for the white paper on the status and future of ground-based gamma-ray astronomy. The white paper is an APS commissioned document, and the overall version has also been released and can be found on astro-ph. This detailed section of the white paper discusses the status of past and current attempts to observe shell-type supernova remnants and diffuse emission from cosmic rays at GeV-TeV energies. We concentrate on the potential of future ground-based gamma-ray experiments to study the acceleration of relativistic charged particles which is one of the main unsolved, yet fundamental, problems in modern astrophysics. The acceleration of particles relies on interactions between energetic particles and magnetic turbulence. In the case of SNRs we can perform spatially resolved studies in systems with known geometry, and the plasma physics deduced from these observations will help us to understand other systems where rapid particle acceleration is believed to occur and where observations as detailed as those of SNRs are not possible.