The High Altitude Water Cherenkov Observatory and its first results

par Dmitry Zaborov (LLR (Paris))

lundi 2 juin 2014, 14:00 → 15:00 Europe/Paris

Amphiteatre (CPPM)

The High Altitude Water Cherenkov Observatory (HAWC) is an air shower array currently under construction in Mexico at an altitude of 4100 m. HAWC will consist of 300 large water tanks covering an area of about 22000 square meters and instrumented with 4 photomultipliers each. The experiment is optimized for the detection of gamma-ray showers in the TeV and sub-TeV range. The large field of view and high duty cycle of HAWC provide excellent opportunities for monitoring of the TeV gamma-ray sky, including detection of flares from Active Galactic Nuclei and Gamma-Ray Bursts. HAWC also promises high resolution data on the Galactic diffuse gamma-ray background and spatially extended sources such as the Cygnus region. It will also survey Galactic gamma-ray sources, such as Pulsar Wind Nebulae and Supernova Remnants, as well as interesting regions for Dark Matter searches. Thanks to its high altitude and advanced design, HAWC will be 15 times more sensitive to point sources than its predecessor, Milagro. Variations of the hadronic Cosmic Ray flux due to Solar activity (Forbush Decreases and Ground Level Enhancements) can already be observed with HAWC. In this talk I will discuss the design and performance of the HAWC observatory and present first results from the partially built HAWC, including observations of a Forbush Decrease, the cosmic ray anisotropy and several gamma-ray sources.

Transparents HAWC-CPPM-final.pdf