Georg Schwefer  (Germany)

georg.schwefer @ mpi-hd.mpg.de

Improving the realism of CTA simulations and Diffuse Emission Analysis with HAWC

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). With the first telescopes to be constructed in the coming years, a precise unserstanding of the system through simulation is crucial. This includes the simulation of non-ideal, real-life scenarios such as broken pixels or an increased night-sky background. The goal is to estimate the impact of these effects from simulations and verify the results on the first pathfinder telescopes.

Galactic Diffuse Emission of gamma rays occurs where the "sea" of galactic cosmic rays diffusing through the Milky Way interacts with the gas and radiation fields present in the Galaxy. It is therefore a tracer of the global distribution of these cosmic rays in the Milky Way and can shed light on the properties of their sources and propagation throughout the galaxy. Using data from the wide field-of-view HAWC gamma-ray observatory in Mexico and state-of-the-art models, the goal is to disentangle the contribution of different gamma-ray emission mechanisms and to make inferences on the energy spectrum of the underlying cosmic ray distribution.

Supervisor:    Jim Hinton (MPIK)