Correlation of Neutrino Emission with Ultra-High Energy Gamma-rays from LHAASO Dark Sources using IceCube and HAWC Observatories

Ultra-High-Energy Gamma-ray sources can be potentially classified as Galactic PeVatrons, that accelerate cosmic-rays up to PeV energies. These accelerated cosmic-rays interact via hadronic processes with a nearby ambient molecular cloud, resulting in the production of gamma-rays and neutrinos. Recently, the Large High Altitude Air Shower Observatory (LHAASO) collaboration published a catalog of sources in which they categorized 14 sources as dark sources, "sources with no detected/only GeV counterpart". These sources are opaque at other wavelengths indicating a potential obscuration by a gas cloud nearby. At these high energies, the Klein-Nishina effect suppresses the leptonic emission and, detecting the astrophysical neutrinos from these sources would provide evidence of hadronic acceleration in the vicinity of these sources. In this work, we will present a dedicated analysis of 4 dark sources using 2860 days of HAWC data and 13 years of IceCube data to look for correlation of neutrinos with gamma-rays. We show that this analysis could advance our understanding of such obscured sources and provide a direct probe of cosmic-ray acceleration in the galaxy.