A comparative study on different background estimation methods for extensive air shower arrays

TL;DR

This study compares four background estimation methods for TeV gamma-ray astronomy using extensive air shower arrays, analyzing their accuracy, stability, and applicability under various detector conditions.

Contribution

It provides a systematic comparison of four background estimation methods, highlighting their strengths and limitations in different operational scenarios.

Findings

The four methods are consistent under stable detector conditions.

The surrounding window method is most stable when detector acceptance varies.

Shorter time windows improve the accuracy of direct integration and time-swapping methods.

Abstract

Background estimation is essential when studying TeV gamma-ray astronomy for extensive air shower arrays. In this work, by applying four applying four different methods including equi-zenith angle method, surrounding window method, direct integration method, and time-swapping method, the number of the background events is calculated. Based on simulation samples, the statistical significance of the excess signal from different background estimation methods is determined. Following this, we discuss the limits and the applicability of the four methods under different conditions. Under the detector stability assumption with signal, the results from the above four methods are consistent at the 1 sigma level. In the no signal condition, when the acceptance of the detector changes with both space and time, the surrounding window method is most stable and hardly affected. In this acceptance assumption, we find that the background estimation in the direct integration and time-swapping methods are sensitive to the selection of time window, and the shorter time window can reduce the impact on the background estimation to some extent.