The Cherenkov Telescope Array On-Site integral sensitivity: observing the Crab

TL;DR

This paper evaluates the on-site integral sensitivity of the Cherenkov Telescope Array using the Crab Nebula as a standard candle, demonstrating its capability to detect faint sources within short exposure times across a broad energy range.

Contribution

It presents the first detailed calculation of CTA's on-site integral sensitivity for the Crab Nebula, considering different emission models and emphasizing the importance of representative spectra.

Findings

Significant detection of Crab Nebula at 10% flux within 1000 seconds.

Sensitivity analysis across various emission models.

Energy threshold below 10 TeV for reliable detection.

Abstract

The Cherenkov Telescope Array (CTA) is the future large observatory in the very high energy (VHE) domain. Operating from 20 GeV to 300 TeV, it will be composed of tens of Imaging Air Cherenkov Telescopes (IACTs) displaced in a large area of a few square kilometers in both the southern and northern hemispheres. The CTA/DATA On-Site Analysis (OSA) is the system devoted to the development of dedicated pipelines and algorithms to be used at the CTA site for the reconstruction, data quality monitoring, science monitoring and realtime science alerting during observations. The OSA integral sensitivity is computed here for the most studied source at Gamma-rays, the Crab Nebula, for a set of exposures ranging from 1000 seconds to 50 hours, using the full CTA Southern array. The reason for the Crab Nebula selection as the first example of OSA integral sensitivity is twofold: (i) this source is characterized by a broad spectrum covering the entire CTA energy range; (ii) it represents, at the time of writing, the standard candle in VHE and it is often used as unit for the IACTs sensitivity. The effect of different Crab Nebula emission models on the CTA integral sensitivity is evaluated, to emphasize the need for representative spectra of the CTA science targets in the evaluation of the OSA use cases. Using the most complete model as input to the OSA integral sensitivity, we obtain a significant detection of the Crab nebula (about 10% of flux) even for a 1000 second exposure, for an energy threshold less than 10 TeV.