Surveying the TeV sky with HAWC

TL;DR

The paper reviews the capabilities and initial findings of the HAWC Observatory, a high-altitude gamma-ray detector, highlighting its potential for sky surveys, transient event detection, and cosmic physics research.

Contribution

This survey provides the first results from HAWC's partial array, demonstrating its ability to map the gamma-ray sky and explore cosmic phenomena.

Findings

Initial gamma-ray sky maps from HAWC

Detection of cosmic ray anisotropies

Constraints on dark matter signatures

Abstract

The High altitude Water Cherenkov (HAWC) Observatory has been completed and began full operation in early 2015. Located at an elevation of 4,100 m near the Sierra Negra volcano in the state of Puebla, Mexico, HAWC consists of 300 water tanks instrumented with 4 PMTs each. The array is optimized for detecting air showers produced by gamma rays with energies between 100 GeV and 100 TeV and can also be used to measure charged cosmic rays. A wide instantaneous field of view of ~2 steradians and a duty cycle >95% allow HAWC to survey two-thirds of the sky every day. These unique capabilities make it possible to monitor variable gamma-ray fluxes and search for gamma-ray bursts and other transient events, providing new insights into particle acceleration in galactic and extra-galactic sources. In this contribution, we will present first results from more than one year of observations with a partial array configuration. We will discuss how HAWC can map the gamma-ray sky as well as probe other physics including cosmic ray anisotropies and the search for signatures of dark matter annihilation.