Prospects for Detecting Galactic Sources of Cosmic Neutrinos with IceCube: An Update

TL;DR

This paper assesses IceCube's potential to detect neutrinos from Galactic sources identified by TeV gamma-ray observations, predicting detection prospects and constraining source properties if no detection occurs.

Contribution

It provides updated predictions for neutrino detection from Galactic sources based on gamma-ray data and evaluates IceCube's capability to identify these sources over twenty years.

Findings

Detection of some sources likely within twenty years.

Some sources could be observed at 3 sigma with six years of data.

Constraints on source spectral index and cutoff energy if no detection occurs.

Abstract

Air-Cherenkov telescopes have mapped the Galactic plane at TeV energies. Here we evaluate the prospects for detecting the neutrino emission from sources in the Galactic plane assuming that the highest energy photons originate from the decay of pions, which yields a straightforward prediction for the neutrino flux from the decay of the associated production of charged pions. Four promising sources are identified based on having a large flux and a flat spectrum. We subsequently evaluate the probability of their identification above the atmospheric neutrino background in IceCube data as a function of time. We show that observing them over the twenty-year lifetime of the instrumentation is likely, and that some should be observable at the $3\,\sigma$ level with six years of data. In the absence of positive results, we derive constraints on the spectral index and cut-off energy of the sources, assuming a hadronic acceleration mechanism.