Performance of the MAGIC telescopes after the major upgrade

TL;DR

The paper evaluates the performance improvements of the MAGIC telescopes after a major upgrade, demonstrating enhanced sensitivity, resolution, and manageable systematic uncertainties in gamma-ray observations.

Contribution

It provides a comprehensive assessment of the MAGIC telescopes' performance post-upgrade, including sensitivity, resolution, and systematic uncertainties, using Crab Nebula observations.

Findings

Sensitivity above 220 GeV is 0.66% of Crab flux in 50 hours.

Angular resolution is below 0.07 degrees at a few hundred GeV.

Energy resolution is approximately 16%.

Abstract

MAGIC is a system of two Imaging Atmospheric Cherenkov Telescopes located on the Canary island of La Palma, Spain. During summer 2011 and 2012 it underwent a major upgrade. The main subsystems upgraded were the MAGIC-I camera and its trigger system and the readout system of both telescopes. We use observations of the Crab Nebula taken at low and medium zenith angles to assess the key performance parameters of the MAGIC stereo system. For low zenith angle observations, the standard trigger threshold of the MAGIC telescopes is about 50 GeV. The integral sensitivity for point-like sources with Crab Nebula-like spectra above 220 GeV is (0.66 +/- 0.03)% of Crab Nebula flux in 50 h of observations. The angular resolution, defined as the sigma of a 2-dimensional Gaussian distribution, at energies of a few hundred GeV is below 0.07degree, while the energy resolution is around 16%. We investigate the effect of the systematic uncertainty on the data taken with the MAGIC telescopes after the upgrade. We estimate that the systematic uncertainties can be divided in the following components: < 15% in energy scale, 11 - 18% in flux normalization and +/-0.15 for the slope of the energy spectrum.