A LIDAR system for the H.E.S.S. experiment

TL;DR

This paper describes the development and deployment of a LIDAR system at the H.E.S.S. experiment site to measure atmospheric properties, reducing systematic errors in cosmic ray flux measurements.

Contribution

It introduces a specialized LIDAR system for atmospheric monitoring tailored to the H.E.S.S. experiment, including hardware, operation, and data collection over three years.

Findings

LIDAR system successfully operated for three years.

Provided atmospheric extinction data relevant to the experiment.

Reduced systematic uncertainties in cosmic ray flux measurements.

Abstract

The H.E.S.S. experiment in Namibia, Africa, is designed to study the origin of high energy cosmic rays from 100 Gev to few tens of TeV, using the Cherenkov technique. To minimize the systematic errors on the derived fluxes of the measured sources, one has to calculate the impact of the atmospheric properties, namely the extinction parameter a. A LIDAR can provide this kind of information within the detectable energy range of the experiment. In this paper we report on the hardware components, operation and data taking of such a system installed on the HESS site for the last three years.