Search for Joint Multimessenger Signals from Potential Galactic Cosmic-Ray Accelerators with HAWC and IceCube

Journal article

The origin of high-energy galactic cosmic rays is yet to be understood, but some galactic cosmic-ray accelerators can accelerate cosmic rays up to PeV energies. The high-energy cosmic rays are expected to interact with the surrounding material or radiation, resulting in the production of gamma-rays and neutrinos. To optimize for the detection of such associated production of gamma-rays and neutrinos for a given source morphology and spectrum, a multimessenger analysis that combines gamma-rays and neutrinos is required. In this study, we use the Multi-Mission Maximum Likelihood framework with IceCube Maximum Likelihood Analysis software and HAWC Accelerated Likelihood to search for a correlation between 22 known gamma-ray sources from the third HAWC gamma-ray catalog and 14 yr of IceCube track-like data. No significant neutrino emission from the direction of the HAWC sources was found. We report the best-fit gamma-ray model and 90% CL neutrino flux limit from the 22 sources. From the neutrino flux limit, we conclude that, for five of the sources, the gamma-ray emission observed by HAWC cannot be produced purely from hadronic interactions. We report the limit for the fraction of gamma-rays produced by hadronic interactions for these five sources.

Authors: Alfaro, R; Alvarez, C; Arteaga-Velázquez, JC; Avila Rojas, D; Ayala Solares, HA

• Publication status: Published
• Peer review status: Peer reviewed
• Publisher: American Astronomical Society
• Journal: The Astrophysical Journal
• Volume: 976
• Issue: 1
• Article number: 8
• Publication date: 2024-11-11
• Acceptance date: 2024-09-26
• DOI: 10.3847/1538-4357/ad812f
• EISSN: 1538-4357
• ISSN: 0004-637X
• Language: English
• Keywords: Particle astrophysics; High energy astrophysics; Neutrino astronomy; Gamma-ray astronomy