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Performance study and observation of the Crab Nebula with the HAWC Outrigger array

ORAL

Abstract



High Altitude Water Cherenkov Gamma-ray Observatory (HAWC) is a ground-based Water Cherenkov observatory and it has been operational since 2015 on the flanks of the Sierra Negra volcano, México. Beginning in 2017, we began deploying an array of outrigger tanks, which expanded the detector's area by about 4 times to nearly 0.1 km^2. Although smaller in size, outrigger tanks greatly improve the core location, direction, and energy reconstruction for showers falling near the main array, which substantially improves sensitivity, particularly in the crucial regime >100 TeV. In addition, the sensitivity to low-energy events was greatly improved with the information provided by the outrigger array, enhancing the ability of HAWC to detect transient events like Gamma-ray Burst(GRB). In this presentation, we will show the first observation of the Crab Nebula with the HAWC Outrigger array and the performance of HAWC with the Outrigger array.

* We acknowledge the support from: the US National Science Foundation (NSF); the US Department of Energy Office of High-Energy Physics; the Laboratory Directed Research and Development (LDRD) program of Los Alamos National Laboratory; Consejo Nacional de Ciencia y Tecnología (CONACyT), México, grants 271051, 232656, 260378, 179588, 254964, 258865, 243290, 132197, A1-S-46288, A1-S-22784, CF-2023- I-645, cátedras 873, 1563, 341, 323, Red HAWC, México; DGAPA-UNAM grants IG101323, IN111716-3, IN111419, IA102019, IN106521, IN110621, IN110521 , IN102223; VIEP-BUAP; PIFI 2012, 2013, PROFOCIE 2014, 2015; the University of Wisconsin Alumni Research Foundation; the Institute of Geophysics, Planetary Physics, and Signatures at Los Alamos National Laboratory; Polish Science Centre grant, DEC2017/27/B/ST9/02272; Coordinación de la Investigación Científica de la Universidad Michoacana; Royal Society - Newton Advanced Fellowship 180385; Generalitat Valenciana, grant CIDEGENT/2018/034; The Program Management Unit for Human Resources & Institutional Development, Research and Innovation, NXPO (grant number B16F630069); Coordinación General Académica e Innovación (CGAI-UdeG), PRODEPSEP UDG-CA-499; Institute of Cosmic Ray Research (ICRR), University of Tokyo. H.F. acknowledges support by NASA under award number 80GSFC21M0002.

Presenters

  • Kwok Lung Fan

    University of Maryland, College Park

Authors

  • Kwok Lung Fan

    University of Maryland, College Park