Mainz 2014 – scientific programme

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T: Fachverband Teilchenphysik

T 25: Gammaastronomie 2

T 25.4: Talk

Monday, March 24, 2014, 17:30–17:45, P2

Potential to Separate Electron and Gamma Ray Induced Air Shower — •Marcel C. Strzys¹, Takayuki Saito², Emiliano Carmona³, and Masahiro Teshima^1,4 — ¹Max-Planck-Institut für Physik, München, Deutschland — ²Kyoto University, Kyoto, Japan — ³CIEMAT, Madrid, Spanien — ⁴ICRR, University of Tokyo, Tokyo, Japan

Imaging air cherenkov telescopes (IACTs) have to deal with a large, isotropic background of cosmic rays consisting of hadrons and electrons. In the last decades, high efforts were made to discriminate especially hadrons constituting by far the largest fraction of the background. As hadronic cascades develop differently from electromagnetic ones, air shower caused by hadrons can be identified in Cherenkov telescopes by their shape. However, electrons produce electromagnetic cascades like gamma rays and can, so far, only be discriminated by their arrival direction. Despite their small contribution to the background, electrons will become the main limiter of the sensitivity for the next generation of IACTs at GeV energies. For the current generation of gamma-ray instrumentation, electrons are already the limiting factor for diffuse gamma ray emission, where the arrival direction cannot be used as a discriminator. In my talk I will show the potential of the height of the shower maximum and the direct Cherenkov light in electron showers, as well as their difficulties based on simulation studies with the CORSIKA air shower simulation.