https://doi.org/10.1051/epjconf/201713603015
Gamma ray astronomy above 30 TeV and the IceCube results
1 OATO-INAF and INFN Sezione di Torino, Torino, Italy.
2 INFN, Sezione di Roma, Roma, Italy.
a e-mail: vernetto@to.infn.it
b e-mail: paolo.lipari@roma1.infn.it
Published online: 23 March 2017
The study of the diffuse Galactic gamma ray emission is of fundamental importance to understand the properties of cosmic ray propagation in the Milky Way, and extending the measurements to E ≳ 30 TeV is of great interest. In the same energy range the IceCube detector has also recently observed a flux of astrophysical neutrinos, and it is important to test experimentally if the neutrino production is accompanied by a comparable emission of high energy photons. For E ≳ 30 TeV, the absorption effects due to e+e− pair production when the high energy photons interact with radiation fields present in space are not negligible and must be taken into account. Gamma rays, in good approximation, are completely absorbed if they have an extragalactic origin, but the absorption is significant also for Galactic photons. In this case the size and angular dependence of the absorption depends on the space distribution of the emission. In this work we estimate the absorption for different models of the space distribution of the gamma ray emission, and discuss the potential of future detectors.
© The Authors, published by EDP Sciences, 2017
This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License 4.0, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.
