Clara Escanuela   (Spain)

clara.escanuela @ mpi-hd.mpg.de

CTA data and volume extraction

The Cherenkov Telescope Array (CTA) is the next generation observatory for very high energy gamma ray astronomy. The southern CTA site will consist on large, small, and medium size telescopes (MSTs) and will cover a very wide range of photon energies (from ~tens of GeV to ~hundreds of TeV). The FlashCam, a photomultiplier-tube based camera with a fully digital readout system, will be used for the MSTs in the southern site. In 2024, the FlashCam will be sent to Chile and will start taking real data for analysis.

This requires a complete laboratory testing which consists on the reproduction of shower-like illumination patterns and time profiles with an LED array. New signal extraction and image cleaning algorithms will also be implemented and tested (with realistic simulations and laboratory data) in the CTA software pipeline. The goal is to improve the signal extraction and data volume reduction for all CTA telescopes as well as to verify the FlashCam performance.

Supervisor:    Jim Hinton   (MPIK)