VIRTUAL

 

Thursday, October 28st    2021

3:45 – 4:45 pm (MT)

WEBEX


Speaker:  Kelly Malone

 

Space Science and Applications group (ISR-1)

Los Alamos National Laboratory

 

 

“The Galactic plane at the very highest energies”

 

 

Abstract: 

Before 2019, no astrophysical sources were known to emit above a few tens of TeV. This changed when the High Altitude Water Cherenkov (HAWC) Collaboration published a catalog of gamma-ray sources emitting above 100 TeV. HAWC is an extensive air shower array located in Puebla, Mexico that uses water Cherenkov detectors to observe gamma rays.  In this talk, I will discuss the improvements in ground-based gamma-ray detection and analysis algorithms that allowed the collaboration to make this discovery.  I will also discuss the numerous scientific implications of this result.  Gamma rays at this energy are important probes of cosmic ray acceleration and can provide clues as to the sources of Galactic cosmic rays. These gamma rays can also be used to study fundamental physics, such as Lorentz  invariance.