Hamburg 2016 – wissenschaftliches Programm
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T: Fachverband Teilchenphysik
T 105: Kosmische Strahlung V
T 105.3: Vortrag
Donnerstag, 3. März 2016, 17:15–17:30, VMP9 SR 29
The upgrade of the HAWC observatory — •Harm Schoorlemmer for the HAWC collaboration — Max-Plank-Institut für Kernphysik, Heidelberg, Germany
The High Altitude Water Cherenkov (HAWC) high-energy gamma-ray observatory has recently been completed near the Sierra Negra volcano in central Mexico. HAWC consists of 300 Water Cherenkov Detectors, each containing 200 tons of purified water, that cover a total surface area of 20,000 m2. HAWC observes gamma rays in the 0.1-100 TeV range and has a sensitivity to TeV-scale gamma-ray sources an order of magnitude better than previous air-shower arrays. The HAWC trigger for the highest energy gamma rays reaches an effective area of 105 m2 but many of them are poorly reconstructed because the shower core falls outside the array. An upgrade that increases the present fraction of well reconstructed showers above 10 TeV by a factor of 3-4 can be done with a sparse outrigger array of small water Cherenkov detectors that pinpoint the core position and by that improve the angular resolution of the reconstructed showers. Such an outrigger array would be of the order of 300 small water Cherenkov detectors of 2.5 m3 placed over an area four times larger than HAWC. The Max Planck Institute für Kernphysik in Heidelberg just joined the collaboration and will provide the FADC electronics for the readout of the outrigger tanks. Detailed simulations are being performed to optimize the performance of the upgrade.