Constraining the coherence scale of the interstellar magnetic field using TeV gamma-ray observations of supernova remnants

Galactic cosmic rays (CRs) are believed to be accelerated at supernova remnant (SNR) shocks. In the hadronic scenario the TeV gamma-ray emission from SNRs originates from decaying pions that are produced in collisions of the interstellar gas and CRs. Using CR-magnetohydrodynamic simulations, we show that magnetic obliquity-dependent shock acceleration is able to reproduce the observed TeV gamma-ray morphology of SNRs such as Vela Jr. and SN1006 solely by varying the magnetic morphology. This implies that gamma-ray bright regions result from quasi-parallel shocks (i.e., when the shock propagates at a narrow angle to the upstream magnetic field), which are known to efficiently accelerate CR protons, and that gamma-ray dark regions point to quasi-perpendicular shock configurations. Comparison of the simulated gamma-ray morphology to observations allows us to constrain the magnetic coherence scale $λ_B$ around Vela Jr. and SN1006 to $λ_B \simeq 13_{-4.3}^{+13}$ pc and $λ_B >200_{-10}^{+80}$ pc, respectively, where the ambient magnetic field of SN1006 is consistent with being largely homogeneous. We find consistent pure hadronic and mixed hadronic-leptonic models that both reproduce the multi-frequency spectra from the radio to TeV gamma rays and match the observed gamma-ray morphology. Finally, to capture the propagation of a SNR shock in a clumpy interstellar medium, we study the interaction of a shock with a dense cloud with numerical simulations and analytics. We construct an analytical gamma-ray model for a core collapse SNR propagating through a structured interstellar medium, and show that the gamma-ray luminosity is only biased by 30% for realistic parameters.

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