Sensitivity of the KM3NeT/ARCA neutrino telescope to point-like neutrino sources

TL;DR

The paper evaluates KM3NeT/ARCA's ability to detect or constrain high-energy neutrino sources in the Galaxy, focusing on its sensitivity, potential discoveries, and implications for gamma-ray source origins.

Contribution

It provides the first detailed sensitivity and discovery potential analysis for KM3NeT/ARCA regarding Galactic neutrino sources, including flux constraints based on gamma-ray observations.

Findings

Detection of strong sources like RX J1713.7-3946 possible in six years

Can constrain hadronic gamma-ray flux contributions below 50%

Tested flux predictions based on gamma-ray measurements

Abstract

KM3NeT will be a network of deep-sea neutrino telescopes in the Mediterranean Sea. The KM3NeT/ARCA detector, to be installed at the Capo Passero site (Italy), is optimised for the detection of high-energy neutrinos of cosmic origin. Thanks to its geographical location on the Northern hemisphere, KM3NeT/ARCA can observe upgoing neutrinos from most of the Galactic Plane, including the Galactic Centre. Given its effective area and excellent pointing resolution, KM3NeT/ARCA will measure or significantly constrain the neutrino flux from potential astrophysical neutrino sources. At the same time, it will test flux predictions based on gamma-ray measurements and the assumption that the gamma-ray flux is of hadronic origin. Assuming this scenario, discovery potentials and sensitivities for a selected list of Galactic sources and to generic point sources with an $E^{-2}$ spectrum are presented. These spectra are assumed to be time independent. The results indicate that an observation with $3\sigma$ significance is possible in about six years of operation for the most intense sources, such as Supernovae Remnants RX\,J1713.7-3946 and Vela Jr. If no signal will be found during this time, the fraction of the gamma-ray flux coming from hadronic processes can be constrained to be below 50\% for these two objects.