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The background from single electromagnetic subcascades for a stereo system of air Cherenkov telescopes

Dorota Sobczyńska

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The MAGIC experiment, a very large imaging air Cherenkov telescope (IACT) with sensitivity to low-energy (E < 100 GeV) VHE gamma rays, has been operated since 2004. It has been found that the γ/hadron separation in IACTs becomes much more difficult below 100 GeV (Albert J et al 2008 Astrophys. J. 674 1037). A system of two large telescopes may eventually be triggered by hadronic events containing Cherenkov light from only one electromagnetic subcascade or two γ subcascades, which are products of the single π0 decay. This is a possible reason for the deterioration of the experiment's sensitivity below 100 GeV. In this paper, a system of two MAGIC telescopes working in a stereoscopic mode is studied using Monte Carlo simulations. The detected images have similar shapes to that of primary γ-rays, and they have small sizes (mainly below 400 photoelectrons (pe)) which correspond to an energy of primary γ-rays below 100 GeV. The background from single or two electromagnetic subcascades is concentrated at energies below 200 GeV. Finally, the number of background events is compared to the number of VHE γ-ray excess events from the Crab Nebula. The investigated background survives simple cuts for sizes below 250 pe, and thus the experiment's sensitivity deteriorates at lower energies.


PACS

95.55.Ka X- and &ggr;-ray telescopes and instrumentation

96.50.sb Composition, energy spectra and interactions

95.55.Vj Neutrino, muon, pion, and other elementary particle detectors; cosmic ray detectors

29.40.Ka Cherenkov detectors

98.70.Rz &ggr;-ray sources; &ggr;-ray bursts

Subjects

Accelerators, beams and electromagnetism

Nuclear physics

Instrumentation and measurement

Particle physics and field theory

Astrophysics and astroparticles

Dates

Issue 12 (December 2009)

Received 31 March 2009

Published 20 October 2009



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