First Limits on the Dark Matter Cross Section with the HAWC Observatory
Megan Longo Proper, J. Patrick Harding, Brenda Dingus
备注：
Presented at the DPF 2015 Meeting of the American Physical Society Division of Particles and Fields, Ann Arbor, Michigan, August 4-8, 2015 and the 34th International Cosmic Ray Conference (ICRC2015), The Hague, The Netherlands. See arXiv:1508.03327 for all HAWC ICRC 2015 contributions. 8 pages, 2 figures
The High Altitude Water Cherenkov (HAWC) gamma-ray observatory is a wide field-of-view observatory sensitive to 100 GeV - 100 TeV gamma rays and cosmic rays. The HAWC observatory is also sensitive to diverse indirect searches for dark matter annihilation, including annihilation from extended dark matter sources, the diffuse gamma-ray emission from dark matter annihilation, and gamma-ray emission from non-luminous dark matter subhalos. Among the most promising classes of objects for the indirect detection of dark matter are dwarf spheroidal galaxies. These objects are expected to have few astrophysical sources of gamma rays but high dark matter content, making them ideal candidates for an indirect dark matter detection with gamma rays. Here we present independent limits on the annihilation cross section for 14 dwarf spheroidal galaxies within the HAWC field-of-view, as well as their combined limit. These are the first limits on the annihilation cross section using data collected with HAWC.
The cosmic-ray flux in the Galaxy can be characterized by combining the knowledge of the distribution of gas in the Galaxy and the observation of gamma rays. We analyze the data from the HAWC Observatory to look for gamma rays in three galactic giant molecular clouds, that are outside the galactic plane ($|b|>5^{\circ}$). We can then test the paradigm that the measured local cosmic-ray flux is the same as the "sea" of Galactic cosmic rays. Due to its large field of view, and high duty cycle, HAWC is suitable to search for gamma rays from large structures in the TeV gamma-ray regime. We present…
M87 is a giant radio galaxy located in the Virgo Cluster, known to be a very high energy (VHE) gamma-ray source. As radio galaxies are considered the misaligned low-redshift counterparts of blazars, they are excellent laboratories for testing AGN emission models. M87 has been detected and monitored by Fermi-LAT and several atmospheric Cherenkov telescopes. Recently, the HAWC Collaboration presented marginal evidence of 4.5 year TeV gamma-ray emission from this object. The HAWC data has the potential to constrain the average VHE emission of sources of complex behavior, like M87, for which the p…
The High Altitude Water Cherenkov Gamma-Ray Observatory has been accumulating a progressively deeper exposure of the TeV sky since its inauguration in March 2015. Located at geographical latitude $+19^\circ$N, HAWC has been able to perform a deep and unbiased survey of two thirds of the sky. We analyzed three years of HAWC data searching for long term persistent emission from a redshift limited ($z\leq 0.3$) sample of active galactic nuclei drawn from the {\it Fermi}-LAT 3FHL catalog. The HAWC dataset confirms the high significance detection of the two nearest BL Lac objects, \mbox{Mrk 421} an…
The particle lateral distribution function (LDF) of air showers at a given altitude is sensitive to the mass composition and primary energy of cosmic rays. Studies of the LDF are difficult to perform due to experimental effects such as sampling bias, as well as shower-to-shower fluctuations in particle density. The High Altitude Water Cherenkov (HAWC) observatory, a dense air shower array located in central Mexico at 4100 m a.s.l., is well-suited to perform detailed event-by-event studies of the LDF of multi-TeV cosmic-ray showers. The detector is instrumented with 1,200 photomultipliers (PMTs…
Detection of Near Horizontal Muons with the HAWC Observatory
HAWC（High Altitude Water Cherenkov）伽马射线天文台能够观测到几乎水平轨道的μ子。HAWC位于海拔4100米a.s.l.在墨西哥内格拉火山上。HAWC探测器由300个水箱组成，每个水箱直径为7.3米，高4.5米，密集分布在22，000米$^{2}$的物理区域内。先前和当前的实验已经在海平面或接近海平面处观测到高天顶角（接近水平）μ子。HAWC作为一个hodoscope能够观察多TeV μ子在天顶角大于75度。这是第一个在高海拔测量近水平μ子的实验，并且多个μ子的距离很大（$\geq$ 10 m）。通过观察以光速传播的近水平粒子，这些μ子可以与广泛的空气簇射区分开来。Sierra Negra和Pico de Orizaba火山的邻近提供了对μ子的额外测量，其岩石覆盖物相当于几公里的水。我们将介绍HAWC观测这些μ子事件的角分布和速率
The High Altitude Water Cherenkov (HAWC) Gamma-Ray Observatory surveys the very high energy sky in the $\sim300$ to 100 TeV energy range and has detected two high-synchrotron-peaked BL Lacertae objects, Markarian 421 and Markarian 501 in a period of time of 837 days between June 2015 and December 2017. In this work, we present the detailed time-average spectral analysis. Using an extragalactic background light model, we address the difference in the intrinsic spectral properties between the two blazars above 1 TeV, preliminary results show that the intrinsic spectrum of Mrk 421 is better descr…
A wide range of data formats and proprietary software have traditionally been used in gamma-ray astronomy, usually developed for a single specific mission or experiment. However, in recent years there has been an increasing effort towards making astronomical data open and easily accessible. Within the gamma-ray community this has translated to the creation of a common data format across different gamma-ray observatories: the "gamma-astro-data-format" (GADF). Based on a similar premise, open-source analysis packages, such as Gammapy, are being developed and aim to provide a single, robust tool …
The High Altitude Water Cherenkov (HAWC) gamma-ray observatory is carrying out a detailed survey of the northern sky at TeV energies. 2HWC J2006+341 is a newly discovered source reported by the point source search in the 2HWC HAWC Observatory Gamma Ray Catalog. Using $\sim$1038 days of HAWC data we carried out a detailed analysis of the region revealing extended emission. No emission has been detected by other TeV instruments at the location of 2HWC J2006+341. We also analyzed publicly available data from the \textit{Fermi}-LAT that show for the first time the existence of an extended GeV sour…
The era of multimessenger astrophysics has arrived with the simultaneous operation of large cosmic-ray, gamma-ray, neutrino, and gravitational-wave observatories. In just the past two years, an electromagnetic (EM) counterpart was detected for a gravitational wave event, and evidence for an EM counterpart of high energy neutrinos has been identified. These measurements have had a major impact on our view of the non-thermal universe, but understanding cosmic accelerators require a substantial increase in the number of multimessenger observations. The Astrophysical Multimessenger Observatory Net…
The High-Altitude Water Cherenkov (HAWC) Observatory is a ground-based TeV gamma-ray observatory in the state of Puebla, Mexico at an altitude of 4100 m above sea level. Its $\sim$22,000 m$^2$ instrumented area, wide field of view (2 sr), and $>$95% uptime make it an ideal instrument for discovering gamma-ray burst (GRB) emission at $>$100 GeV. Such a discovery would provide key information about the origins of prompt GRB emission as well as constraints on EBL models and the violation of Lorentz invariance. We present here the results of our current GRB search methods, which include an all-sky…
The High Altitude Water Cherenkov (HAWC) Observatory is a wide-field-of-view gamma-ray observatory that is optimized to detect gamma rays between ~300 GeV and several hundred TeV. The HAWC Collaboration recently released their third source catalog (3HWC), which contains 65 sources. One of these sources, the ultra-high-energy gamma-ray source 3HWC J1908+063, may exhibit a hardening of the spectral index at the highest energies (above 56 TeV). At least two populations of particles are needed to satisfactorily explain the highest energy emission. This second component could be leptonic or hadroni…
With an instantaneous field of view of 2 sr and a duty cycle > 95%, the High Altitude Water Cherenkov (HAWC) Gamma-Ray Observatory is a perfect instrument for monitoring variable TeV sources. Because radio galaxies are a type of Active Galactic Nuclei (AGN) with their jets misaligned with respect to our line of sight, they may help us to probe the physics of very-high-energy (VHE) emission processes in these objects. Three out of four radio galaxies that have been detected at TeV energies by other facilities are located within the field of view of the HAWC Observatory: M87, NGC 1275, and 3C 26…
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Supernova remnants (SNRs) have long been hypothesized as the main source of Galactic Cosmic Rays up to PeV energies. Some of them have indeed been shown to accelerate protons to TeV energies and above. But which of them are indeed efficient accelerators of protons and nuclei? And up to which energies can they accelerate these particles? Measurements of non-thermal emission, especially in the X-ray and gamma-ray regimes, are essential to answer these questions. The High-Altitude Water Cherenkov (HAWC) observatory, surveying the northern TeV gamma-ray sky, is currently the most sensitive wide fi…
The detection of the gravitational wave GW170817 defined a breakthrough in multi-messenger astronomy. For the first time, a gravitational wave transient detected by the Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory (LIGO) and Virgo interferometer was associated with a faint electromagnetic gamma-ray counterpart reported by the Gamma-ray Burst Monitor (GBM) aboard on the Fermi satellite. GRB 170817A was followed up by an enormous observational campaign covering a large fraction of the electromagnetic spectrum. In this work, we use the data from High Altitude Water Cherenkov (HAWC) gamma-r…
We present a search in IceCube data for neutrino emission from Galactic TeV gamma-ray sources detected by the HAWC gamma-ray observatory. HAWC serves as the excellent instrument to complement IceCube with its energy range extending to very high energies. Assuming that the highest energy photons originate from the decay of pions, rather than from accelerated leptons, the very high energy gamma-rays observed by HAWC are expected to be correlated with neutrinos. Using eight years of IceCube data, we report on two analyses that investigate a possible neutrino--gamma ray correlation. The first is a…
