Estimating the contribution of Galactic sources to the diffuse neutrino flux

Motivated by recent IceCube observations we reexamine the idea that microquasars are high energy neutrino emitters. By stretching to the maximum the parameters of the Fermi engine we show that the nearby high-mass x-ray binary LS 5039 could accelerate protons up to above about 20 PeV. These highly r...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:Physical review. D, Particles, fields, gravitation, and cosmology Particles, fields, gravitation, and cosmology, 2014-12, Vol.90 (12), Article 123010
Main Authors: Anchordoqui, Luis A., Goldberg, Haim, Paul, Thomas C., da Silva, Luiz H. M., Vlcek, Brian J.
Format: Article
Language:English
Subjects:
Binary stars
Cosmology
Diffusion
Flux
Gravitation
Microquasars
Neutrinos
X-ray stars
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Summary:Motivated by recent IceCube observations we reexamine the idea that microquasars are high energy neutrino emitters. By stretching to the maximum the parameters of the Fermi engine we show that the nearby high-mass x-ray binary LS 5039 could accelerate protons up to above about 20 PeV. These highly relativistic protons could subsequently interact with the plasma producing neutrinos up to the maximum observed energies. After that we adopt the spatial density distribution of high-mass x-ray binaries obtained from the deep INTEGRAL Galactic plane survey, and we assume LS 5039 typifies the microquasar population to demonstrate that these powerful compact sources could provide a dominant contribution to the diffuse neutrino flux recently observed by IceCube.
ISSN:1550-7998
1550-2368
DOI:10.1103/PhysRevD.90.123010