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HAWC is currently under construction on the Sierra Negra, Pico de Orizaba
National Park, Puebla, Mexico at 19 deg N, 97 deg W, with an
elevation of 4100 m above sea level. It is a large water Cherenkov
air-shower detector that will consist of 300 large tanks of highly purified
water (7.3 m diameter x 4.5 m deep; 200,000 liters), covering an
area of ~ 22,000 square meters. Each tank will be instrumented with
four hemispherical photomultiplier tubes (three 8 inches and one 10 inches
in diameter), to detect particles from extensive air showers produced by
gamma rays and cosmic rays. Charged particles traveling through the water
of the tanks produce Cherenkov light that will be captured by the
photomultiplier tubes.
HAWC is a high-duty cycle (> 90 %), large field-of-view (~ 2 sr)
instrument capable of monitoring the gamma ray sky at energies up to 100
TeV. HAWC will provide an unbiased survey of the TeV gamma ray sky,
measuring spectra of galactic sources up to 100 TeV, and will map galactic
diffuse gamma ray emission. With 15 times the sensitivity of its
predecessor experiment, Milagro, the HAWC Observatory will enable
significant detections of Crab-like fluxes each day at a median energy of 1
TeV. HAWC will also have significant overlap with space- and ground-based
detectors, which will also offer synergies between them. The current
construction/status of HAWC and its scientific case are presented here. |