Sensitivity of the high altitude water Cherenkov detector to sources of multi-TeV gamma rays

By A. Abeysekara, R. Alfaro, C. Alvarez, J. Álvarez, R. Arceo, J. C. Arteaga-Vel'azquez, H. Solares, A. Barber, B. Baughman, N. Bautista-Elivar and 91 more. 2013

206 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Abstract The High Altitude Water Cherenkov (HAWC) observatory is an array of large water Cherenkov detectors sensitive to gamma rays and hadronic cosmic rays in the energy band between 100 GeV and 100 TeV. The observatory will be used to measure high-energy protons and cosmic rays via detection of the energetic secondary particles reaching the ground when one of these particles interacts in the atmosphere above the detector. HAWC is under construction at a site 4100 meters above sea level on the northern slope of the volcano Sierra Negra, which is located in central Mexico at 19 ° N latitude. It is scheduled for completion in 2014. In this paper we estimate the sensitivity of the HAWC instrument to point-like and extended sources of gamma rays. The source fluxes are modeled using both unbroken power laws and power laws with exponential cutoffs. HAWC, in one year, is sensitive to point sources with integral power-law spectra as low as 5 × 10 - 13 cm - 2 sec - 1 above 2 TeV (approximately 50 mCrab) over 5 sr of the sky. This is a conservative estimate based on simple event parameters and is expected to improve as the data analysis techniques are refined. We discuss known TeV sources and the scientific contributions that HAWC can make to our understanding of particle acceleration in these sources.

Subfields: Nuclear and High Energy Physics

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/02a775a8a3e5ced96c4e0651b43aac00db21d815

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In Nuclear and High Energy Physics

Citations in the corpus

Measurement of the Crab Nebula Spectrum Past 100 TeV with HAWC (2019, background): “Compactness, first described in Abeysekara et al. (2013), is effective at identifying air showers containing muons.”
The extragalactic background light revisited and the cosmic photon–photon opacity (Corrigendum) (2017, background): “(1) Based on the above considerations, several experiments are now being planned or under development, targeting the highestenergy photons, such as the ASTRI mini array (Di Pierro et al. 2013; Vercellone et al. 2013), HAWC (Abeysekara et al. 2013); HiSCORE (Tluczykont et al. 2014), LHAASO (Cui et al”
A burst in a wind bubble and the impact on baryonic ejecta: high-energy gamma-ray flashes and afterglows from fast radio bursts and pulsar-driven supernova remnants (2016, methodology): “For this one would need larger gamma-ray detectors, such as the High-Altitude Water Cherenkov Observatory (HAWC), which has an effective area of∼ 100 m2 at 100 GeV and 2×104 m2 at 1 TeV, respectively (Abeysekara et al. 2013).”
Observation of the Crab Nebula with the HAWC Gamma-Ray Observatory (2017, methodology): “Figure 16 shows the computed differential sensitivity of HAWC to sources at the declination of the Crab utilizing the procedure of Abeysekara et al. (2013) with the analysis presented here.”
THE EXTRAGALACTIC BACKGROUND LIGHT, THE HUBBLE CONSTANT, AND ANOMALIES: CONCLUSIONS FROM 20 YEARS OF TeV GAMMA-RAY OBSERVATIONS (2015, background): “Such methods are in principle not affected by overestimated uncertainties from published spectra, where correlations are neglected, and would open the possibility of a broadband spectral fit, e.g., combining the data from Fermi-LAT, Cherenkov telescopes, and HAWC (Abeysekara et al. 2013).”