While from the energetic point of view SNRs are viable sources of Galactic CRs, the issue of whether they can accelerate protons up to PeV remains unsolved. Here we discuss particle acceleration at the forward shock of SN and discuss the possibility
that the escaping particle current may excite a non-resonant instability that in turn leads to the formation of resonant modes confining particles close to the shock and increasing the maximum energy. This mechanism works throughout the expansion of the SN explosion, from the ejecta dominated (ED) to the Sedov-Taylor (ST) phase. Because of their higher explosion rate,we focus on type II SNae expanding in the slow, dense red supergiant wind. When the explosion occurs in such winds, the transition between the ED and the ST phase is likely to take place within a few tens of years. As a result, the spectrum of accelerated particles shows a break in the slope, at the maximum energy (Em) achieved at the beginning of the ST phase. Above this energy, the spectrum becomes steeper but remains a power law than developing an exponential cutoff. We show that for type II SNae typical parameters, proton Em can easily reach PeV energies, confirming that type II SNRs are the best candidate sources for CRs at the knee. We have tried to fit KASCADE-Grande, ARGO -YBJ and YAC1-Tibet Array data with our model but we could not find any parameter combination that could explain all data sets. Indeed the recent measurement of the proton and helium spectra in the knee region, with the ARGO-YBJ and YAC1-Tibet Array, has made the situation very confused. These measurements suggest that the knee in the light component is at 650 TeV, appreciably below the overall spectrum knee. This finding would resolve the problem of reaching very high energies in SNae, but, on the other hand, it would open a critical issue in the transition region between Galactic and extragalactic CRs.
The middle-aged supernova remnant (SNR) W44 has recently attracted attention because of its relevance regarding the origin of Galactic cosmic-rays. The gamma-ray missions AGILE and Fermi have established, for the first time for a SNR, the spectral co
ntinuum below 200 MeV which can be attributed to neutral pion emission. Confirming the hadronic origin of the gamma-ray emission near 100 MeV is then of the greatest importance. Our paper is focused on a global re-assessment of all available data and models of particle acceleration in W44, with the goal of determining on a firm ground the hadronic and leptonic contributions to the overall spectrum. We also present new gamma-ray and CO NANTEN2 data on W44, and compare them with recently published AGILE and Fermi data. Our analysis strengthens previous studies and observations of the W44 complex environment and provides new information for a more detailed modeling. In particular, we determine that the average gas density of the regions emitting 100 MeV - 10 GeV gamma-rays is relatively high (n= 250 - 300 cm^-3). The hadronic interpretation of the gamma-ray spectrum of W44 is viable, and supported by strong evidence. It implies a relatively large value for the average magnetic field (B > 10^2 microG) in the SNR surroundings, sign of field amplification by shock-driven turbulence. Our new analysis establishes that the spectral index of the proton energy distribution function is p1 = 2.2 +/- 0.1 at low energies and p2 = 3.2 +/- 0.1 at high energies. We critically discuss hadronic versus leptonic-only models of emission taking into account simultaneously radio and gamma-ray data. We find that the leptonic models are disfavored by the combination of radio and gamma-ray data. Having determined the hadronic nature of the gamma-ray emission on firm ground, a number of theoretical challenges remains to be addressed.
