Bell-Instability-Mediated Spectral Modulation of Hadronic Gamma Rays from a Supernova Remnant Interacting with a Molecular Cloud

Abstract: Supernova remnants (SNRs) are believed to be the site of galactic cosmic-ray acceleration. However, the details of the cosmic-ray acceleration are still not well understood. Gamma ray observation is a promising method to study cosmic-ray acceleration in the SNRs, because a hadronic gamma ray can trace high energy cosmic-rays above ~GeV energy. Conventional theory predicts that the hadronic gamma ray shows a flat vFv spectrum from the pion-creation threshold energy to the maximum energy of diffusive shock acceleration. In this paper, by employing numerical simulations that solve a hybrid system of the magnetohydrodynamics of a molecular cloud and diffusive propagation of cosmic-rays, we demonstrate that the hadronic gamma ray spectrum can be harder than the conventional one and that the modulated spectrum becomes consistent with observations. The modification mechanism is explained as follows: The cosmic-rays accelerated at the supernova blast wave shock propagate into a clump of a molecular cloud. The cosmic-ray streaming in the cloud induces the so-called Bell instability that induces Alfven waves in the cloud. The induced magnetic field fluctuations prevent further cosmic-ray incursion by diminishing the diffusion coefficient for the cosmic-rays below ~1 TeV energy. This mechanism reinforces recent claims of a similar spectral modification by magnetic field amplification around a molecular cloud by Inoue et al.(2012) and Celli et al.(2018).