Probing the Galactic Origin of the IceCube Excess with Gamma-Rays

By M. Ahlers, Kohta Murase. 2013

170 citations recorded by the source corpus.

The IceCube Collaboration has recently reported evidence for a high-energy extraterrestrial neutrino flux. During two years of operation 28 events with energies between 30 TeV and 1.2 PeV were observed while only 10.6 events were expected from conventional atmospheric backgrounds. The hadronic interactions responsible for this IceCube excess will also produce a flux of high-energy gamma-rays that can serve as a probe of source direction and distance. We show that existing TeV to PeV diffuse gamma-ray limits support the interpretation that the IceCube excess is mostly of extragalactic origin. However, we point out that gamma-ray surveys are biased in the Northern Hemisphere whereas the recent IceCube data tentatively show a weak preference for the Southern Sky. Possible sub-dominant contributions from Galactic neutrino sources like remnants of supernovae and hypernovae are marginally consistent with present gamma-ray limits. This emphasizes the importance of future diffuse TeV to PeV gamma-ray surveys in the Southern Hemisphere, particularly in the extended region around the Galactic Center including the Fermi Bubbles.

Subfields: Nuclear and High Energy Physics

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/d46e24e967ae54845b1a0665c962a34c6b97e0d8

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In Nuclear and High Energy Physics

1. Kohta Murase
2. S. Ando
3. I. Tamborra
4. W. Rhode
5. S. Boser
6. T. Kintscher
7. Thomas K. Gaisser
8. D. Soldin

Citations in the corpus

• Star-forming galaxies as the origin of diffuse high-energy backgrounds: gamma-ray and neutrino connections, and implications for starburst history (2014, background): “However, most of the observed events do not originate from the extended region around the Galactic center which makes the scenario of the Galactic origin slightly disfavored, and GeV-PeV gamma-ray observations have already put meaningful constraints on various Galactic possibilities including the Ga”
• IceCube-Gen2: the window to the extreme Universe (2020, background): “The expected diffuse Galactic neutrino flux from interactions of CR with interstellar gas and unresolved CR sources is, averaged over the whole sky, about an order of magnitude lower than the isotropic flux observed in IceCube for E ≃ 100 TeV [219–222].”