Latest news from the High Altitude Water Cherenkov Observatory

39th Symposium on Nuclear Physics 2016

Muñoz, A González^1

Instituto de Física, Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México, Apartado Postal 20-364, México

D.F. 01000, Mexico^1

关键词: Acceleration process;    Continuous monitoring;    Field of views;    Gamma ray bursts;    National parks;    Scientific results;    Transient events;    Very high energies;   

Others  :  https://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.1088/1742-6596/730/1/012013/pdf
DOI  :  10.1088/1742-6596/730/1/012013

来源: IOP

【 摘 要 】

The High Altitude Water Cherenkov Observatory is an air shower detector designed to study very-high-energy gamma rays (∼ 100 GeV to ∼ 100 TeV). It is located in the Pico de Orizaba National Park, Mexico, at an elevation of 4100 m. HAWC started operations since August 2013 with 111 tanks and in April of 2015 the 300 tanks array was completed. HAWC's unique capabilities, with a field of view of ∼ 2 sr and a high duty cycle of 5%, allow it to survey 2/3 of the sky every day. These features makes HAWC an excellent instrument for searching new TeV sources and for the detection of transient events, like gamma-ray bursts. Moreover, HAWC provides almost continuous monitoring of already known sources with variable gamma-ray fluxes in most of the northern and part of the southern sky. These observations will bring new information about the acceleration processes that take place in astrophysical environments. In this contribution, some of the latest scientific results of the observatory will be presented.