Constraints on Hadronic Emission from Microquasars Detected by LHAASO

Abstract

Recently, the LHAASO collaboration reported ultra-high-energy (UHE) gamma rays from six microquasars. For five of these sources, the emission extends beyond $100$ TeV, making microquasars promising candidates for Galactic PeVatrons. We investigate whether gamma-rays around $100$ TeV originate from hadronic interactions of accelerated cosmic rays (CRs) with the ambient medium, and we estimate the contribution of these sources to the measured CR spectrum around the knee. We also place upper limits on six LHAASO microquasars with no detected UHE emission. We assume diffusion-dominated propagation of CR, with a diffusion coefficient suppressed compared to the average Galactic value near the source and equal to the Galactic value at large distances. We assume continuous injection over timescales of $t_{\rm age}=0.1-1$ Myrs. Using available measurements of the gas density, we find that hadronic interactions alone cannot fully account for the observed emission for any of the detected sources. However, in the case of GRS 1915+105 and MAXI J1820+070, the hadronic scenario may still be valid when considering acceleration efficiency higher than $10\%$. We then derive upper limits on the hadronic contribution to the observed gamma-ray flux. We estimate that the detected sources contribute at most $\sim4\%$ of the Galactic CR spectrum at $1$ PeV for an injection timescales of $0.1$ Myrs and a CR acceleration efficiency of $10 \%$. When adopting the maximum acceleration efficiency allowed by the gamma-ray observations the contribution rises to $37\%$. Longer injection timescales ($\sim 1$ Myrs) lead to contributions exceeding the observational constraints. For sources not detected at UHE, we obtained a maximum contribution of $\sim 17\%$, achieved assuming continuous injection over $1$ Myr.