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Galactic cosmic ray propagation: sub-PeV diffuse gamma-ray and neutrino emission

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Abstract

The Tibet ASγ experiment just reported their measurement of sub-PeV diffuse gamma-ray emission from the Galactic disk, with the highest energy up to 957 TeV. These diffuse gamma rays are most likely the hadronic origin by cosmic ray (CR) interaction with interstellar gas in the galaxy. This measurement provides direct evidence to the hypothesis that the Galactic Cosmic Rays (GCRs) can be accelerated beyond PeV energies. In this work, we try to explain the sub-PeV diffuse gamma-ray spectrum with different CR propagation models. We find that there is a tension between the sub-PeV diffuse gamma-ray and the local CR spectrum. To describe the sub-PeV diffuse gamma-ray flux, it generally requires larger local CR flux than measurement in the knee region. We further calculate the PeV neutrino flux from the CR propagation model. Even all of these sub-PeV diffuse gamma rays originate from the propagation, the Galactic Neutrinos (GNs) only account for less than ∼ 15% of observed flux, most of which are still from extragalactic sources.

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Acknowledgements

This work was supported by the National Key Research and Development Program of China (No. 2016YFA0400200), the National Natural Science Foundation of China (Nos. U1738209, 11875264, 11635011, U2031110).

Software: GALPROP ([74, 75]) available at https://galprop.stanford.edu.

DRAGON ([76, 77]) available at https://github.com/cosmicrays.

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  1. Key Laboratory of Particle Astrophysics, Institute of High Energy Physics, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Beijing, 100049, China

    Bing-Qiang Qiao, Wei Liu, Meng-Jie Zhao, Xiao-Jun Bi & Yi-Qing Guo

  2. University of Chinese Academy of Sciences, Beijing, 100049, China

    Yi-Qing Guo

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  1. Bing-Qiang Qiao
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Correspondence to Wei Liu or Meng-Jie Zhao.

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Qiao, BQ., Liu, W., Zhao, MJ. et al. Galactic cosmic ray propagation: sub-PeV diffuse gamma-ray and neutrino emission. Front. Phys. 17, 44501 (2022). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11467-022-1160-7

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