Flux upper limits of diffuse TeV gamma rays from the Galactic plane using the effective area of the Tibet-II and -III arrays Original Research Article

We obtained new upper limits on the diffuse gamma rays from the inner Galactic (IG) and outer Galactic (OG) planes in 3–10 TeV region, using the Tibet air shower data and new Monte Carlo simulation results. A difference of the effective area of the air-shower array for observing gamma rays and cosmic rays was carefully taken into account in this analysis, resulting in that the flux upper limits of the diffuse TeV gamma rays were reduced by factors of 4.0–3.7 for 3–10 TeV than those in our previous results (Amenomori, M., Ayabe, S., Cui, S.W., et al. Observation of multi-TeV diffuse gamma rays from the Galactic plane with the Tibet air shower array. Astrophys. J. 580, 887–895, 2002.). This new result suggests that the inverse power index of the energy spectrum of source electrons responsible for generating diffuse TeV gamma rays through inverse Compton effect should be steeper than 2.2 and 2.1 for IG and OG planes, respectively, with 99%C.L.