Probing LHAASO Galactic PeVatrons through gamma-ray and neutrino correspondence

TL;DR

This paper models gamma-ray and neutrino emissions from LHAASO Galactic PeVatrons, predicting neutrino fluxes detectable by future neutrino observatories, to understand cosmic ray acceleration in these sources.

Contribution

It introduces a model linking gamma-ray and neutrino emissions from LHAASO sources, predicting neutrino fluxes and assessing detectability with upcoming detectors.

Findings

Neutrino fluxes from two specific sources are below IceCube sensitivity but detectable in future detectors.

Most of the 10 analyzed LHAASO PeVatron sources have neutrino fluxes detectable in IceCube-Gen2 and KM3NeT.

Future neutrino detectors can probe cosmic ray acceleration mechanisms in Galactic PeVatrons.

Abstract

Recently, Large High Altitude Air Shower Observatory (LHAASO) has detected several Galactic point sources of ultra high energy (UHE; $E_{\gamma}> 100$ TeV) gamma-rays. These gamma-rays are possibly created in leptonic or hadronic interactions of cosmic rays (CRs) of PeV energies. In the hadronic channel ($p-p$ interaction), the gamma-rays are accompanied by neutrinos. The detection of neutrinos is therefore crucial in understanding CR acceleration in such objects. To estimate the neutrino flux, we adopt the two LHAASO sources (J2226+6057, J1908+0621) found to be spatially associated with the Supernova remnants (SNR G106.3+2.7, SNR G40.5-0.5). For these two sources, the detected TeV-PeV gamma-ray spectra are found to be unusually hard (with spectral index $\sim$ 1.8). We develop a model of gamma-ray and neutrino emission based on the above two prototypes. The neutrino fluxes from these two sources are found to be below the IceCube sensitivity, but are detectable in upcoming IceCube-Gen2 and KM3NeT experiments. We further estimate the neutrino fluxes from similar other 10 LHAASO PeVatron sources and most of them are found to be detectable in IceCube-Gen2 and KM3NeT. Finally, we explore our model parameters, in particular the spectral power law index and estimate the future potential of the neutrino detectors to probe CR acceleration in such Galactic sources.