Identifying Galactic PeVatrons with Neutrinos

TL;DR

This paper evaluates IceCube's potential to detect neutrinos from Galactic cosmic ray sources, showing it could identify such sources within a few years by analyzing secondary muon energies to distinguish signals.

Contribution

It provides a realistic assessment of IceCube's ability to identify Galactic PeVatrons using energy discrimination of muons, considering astrophysical uncertainties.

Findings

IceCube can identify Galactic sources at 3 sigma in 1 year.

IceCube can reach 5 sigma detection in 3 years.

Energy measurement improves signal-background discrimination.

Abstract

We perform a realistic evaluation of the potential of IceCube, a kilometer-scale neutrino detector under construction at the South Pole, to detect neutrinos in the direction of the potential accelerators of the Galactic cosmic rays. We take fully account of the fact that the measurement of the energy of the secondary muons can be used to further discriminate between the signal and the background of atmospheric neutrinos. We conclude that IceCube could identify the sources in the Milagro sky map as the sources of the Galactic cosmic rays at the 3 sigma level in one year and at the 5 sigma level in three years. We discuss the dependence of these expectations on ambiguities, mostly associated with our incomplete knowledge of the astrophysics of the sources.