Project A1:
"Multimessenger view of the Galaxy: tracing turbulence and cosmic-ray interactions in the interstellar medium"

Project Description

In the past decade, our view of the Galaxy has improved drastically through precision observations at all wavelengths, from radio up to gamma-ray energies. Most recently, the detection of Galactic plane neutrino emission was added to the set of messengers. Propagation codes like GalProp, DRAGON, PICARD, and CRPropa, all having different features, have been developed to understand the full picture of Galactic multimessenger emission.
We have focused on the large-scale modeling of the latter in Phase 1, improving and employing the rather versatile modularly-structured CRPropa framework.
In Phase 2, we aim to further improve the cosmic-ray transport modeling by allowing for the spatial variation of the diffusion tensor not only due to the magnetic field geometry determining the local anisotropy, but also due to magnitude changes due to turbulence conditions varying within the Galactic disk. We will further investigate smaller structures by integrating medium- to small-scale physics modeling of the interstellar medium with observations of gamma-rays from molecular clouds obtained with the Fermi satellite and a dedicated IceCube analysis looking for neutrinos from star-forming regions in order to address three objectives:

1. What is the impact of spatially varying interstellar turbulence conditions on gamma-ray and neutrino signals?
2. How are cosmic rays transported in molecular clouds and star-forming regions, and what are the resulting gamma-ray and neutrino fluxes?
3. What are the signatures of local structures in the multimessenger observations, particularly in neutrinos and gamma-rays?