Deexcitation nuclear gamma-ray line emission from low-energy cosmic rays in the inner Galaxy

TL;DR

This paper models low-energy cosmic-ray nuclei in the inner Galaxy and predicts nuclear gamma-ray line emissions, suggesting potential detectability with future gamma-ray telescopes, which could confirm the presence of these cosmic rays.

Contribution

It introduces models for the origin of low-energy cosmic-ray nuclei and predicts gamma-ray line emissions, providing a basis for future observational tests.

Findings

Predicted gamma-ray line fluxes are below current detection limits.

Future telescopes could detect the 4.4-MeV gamma-ray line.

Strong continuum emission in 1-8 MeV exceeds some instrument sensitivities.

Abstract

Recent observations of high ionization rates of molecular hydrogen in diffuse interstellar clouds point to a distinct low-energy cosmic-ray component. Supposing that this component is made of nuclei, two models for the origin of such particles are explored and low-energy cosmic-ray spectra are calculated which, added to the standard cosmic ray spectra, produce the observed ionization rates. The clearest evidence of the presence of such low-energy nuclei between a few MeV per nucleon and several hundred MeV per nucleon in the interstellar medium would be a detection of nuclear \gamma-ray line emission in the range E_ 0.1 - 10 MeV, which is strongly produced in their collisions with the interstellar gas and dust. Using a recent \gamma-ray cross section compilation for nuclear collisions, \gamma-ray line emission spectra are calculated alongside with the high-energy \gamma-ray emission due to {\pi} 0 decay, the latter providing normalization of the absolute fluxes by comparison with Fermi-LAT observations of the diffuse emission above E \gamma = 0.1 GeV. Our predicted fluxes of strong nuclear \gamma-ray lines from the inner Galaxy are well below the detection sensitivies of INTEGRAL, but a detection, especially of the 4.4-MeV line, seems possible with new-generation \gamma-ray telescopes based on available technology. We predict also strong \gamma-ray continuum emission in the 1-8 MeV range, which in a large part of our model space for low-energy cosmic rays exceeds considerably estimated instrument sensitivities of future telescopes.