Detecting Neutrino Emission from Supernova Remnants: A Theoretically Motivated Target Catalog

Abstract Galactic supernova remnants (SNRs) are thought to accelerate cosmic rays (CRs) to several PeV energies, but this has yet to be confirmed as general behavior. Although several sources show ∼100 TeV γ -rays, their hadronic origin is uncertain; a matching neutrino signal would provide definitive evidence. Using insight from the theory of diffusive shock acceleration, we evaluate the spectra and environments of the sample of Galactic SNRs to identify those most likely to be hadronic, categorizing them into a tiered catalog, depending on their likelihood to produce neutrinos detectable in the TeV–PeV range. We then calculate the estimated stacked sensitivity of IceCube for each tier using IceCube’s 10-year public data. Our results suggest that this strategy of stacking SNRs and carefully excluding leptonic sources by using theoretical arguments may allow for a detection of this source class that would otherwise be impossible. A follow-up analysis of these catalogs using TeV–PeV sensitive neutrino data from IceCube (or similar telescopes like KM3NeT/ARCA) offers the most decisive, near-future test for the hadronic nature of these SNRs and the maximum energies of their CR spectra.