The High Altitude Water Cherenkov (HAWC) observatory is an array of large water Cherenkov detectors sensitive to gamma rays and hadronic cosmic rays in the energy band between 100 GeV and 100 TeV. The observatory will be used to measure high-energy protons and cosmic rays via detection of the energetic secondary particles reaching the ground when one of these particles interacts in the atmosphere above the detector. HAWC is under construction at a site 4100 meters above sea level on the northern slope of the volcano Sierra Negra, which is located in central Mexico at 19• N latitude. It is scheduled for completion in 2014. In this paper we estimate the sensitivity of the HAWC instrument to point-like and extended sources of gamma rays. The source fluxes are modeled using both unbroken power laws and power laws with exponential cutoffs. HAWC, in one year, is sensitive to point sources with integral powerlaw spectra as low as 5 × 10 −13 cm −2 sec −1 above 2 TeV (approximately 50 mCrab) over 5 sr of the sky. This is a conservative estimate based on simple event parameters and is expected to improve as the data analysis techniques are refined. We discuss known TeV sources and the scientific contributions that HAWC can make to our understanding of particle acceleration in these sources.
We present the sensitivity of HAWC to Gamma Ray Bursts (GRBs). HAWC is a very
high-energy gamma-ray observatory currently under construction in Mexico at an
altitude of 4100 m. It will observe atmospheric air showers via the water
Cherenkov method. HAWC will consist of 300 large water tanks instrumented with
4 photomultipliers each. HAWC has two data acquisition (DAQ) systems. The main
DAQ system reads out coincident signals in the tanks and reconstructs the
direction and energy of individual atmospheric showers. The scaler DAQ counts
the hits in each photomultiplier tube (PMT) in the detector and searches for a
statistical excess over the noise of all PMTs. We show that HAWC has a
realistic opportunity to observe the high-energy power law components of GRBs
that extend at least up to 30 GeV, as it has been observed by Fermi LAT. The
two DAQ systems have an energy threshold that is low enough to observe events
similar to GRB 090510 and GRB 090902b with the characteristics observed by
Fermi LAT. HAWC will provide information about the high-energy spectra of GRBs
which in turn could help to understanding about e-pair attenuation in GRB jets,
extragalactic background light absorption, as well as establishing the highest
energy to which GRBs accelerate particles
A pair of thin prisms is used to deviate a light beam without changing the image orientation in a vectorial shearing interferometer. The relative angle between prisms determines the displacement of the wave front and its tilt. The direction of the beam displacement is controlled by means of changing the relative angle between prisms. This system is employed to control the displacement of a sheared wave front as a vector quantity and to introduce a controlled amount of tilt in what we believe is a novel interferometric shearing system. The predicted performance of this wave-front director is confirmed experimentally.
VAMOS 1 was a prototype detector built in 2011 at an altitude of 4100 m a.s.l. in the state of Puebla, Mexico. The aim of VAMOS was to finalize the design, construction techniques and data acquisition system of the HAWC observatory. HAWC is an air-shower array currently under construction at the same site of VAMOS with the purpose to study the TeV sky. The VAMOS setup included six water Cherenkov detectors and two different data acquisition systems. It was in operation between October 2011 and May 2012 with an average live time of 30%. Besides the scientific verification purposes, the eight months of data were used to obtain the results presented in this paper: the detector response to the Forbush decrease of March 2012, and the analysis of possible emission, at energies above 30 GeV, for long gamma-ray bursts GRB111016B and GRB120328B.
A polymer optical Sagnac interferometer is proposed as a compact and
low-cost refractive index sensor for the first time to our best
knowledge. The Sagnac interferometer is fabricated by only one piece
of fiber to facilitate its fabrication and to avoid losses due to
misalignment or fusion. The coupler was developed based on chemical
and twisting techniques of
∼
5
c
m
of fiber. We modified the coupling
ratio by varying the refractive index of media surrounding the coupler
and consequently modified the transmission. For several values of
mass percent concentration of sugar solutions surrounding the coupler,
we found that transmittance decreases as the mass concentration
increases. However, the decay is faster for the low concentration,
while the decay is slower for higher concentrations. Two sets of
experiments were carried out, at high (
≥
1 gm/100 ml) and low (
<2007
This article presents experimental results demonstrating the performance of an erbium-doped silica fiber as a remote temperature sensor in the interval from 20 ı C to 200 ı C. The sensor is based on the change in the fluorescence intensity ratio of two spectral bands as a function of temperature. The green fluorescence signal was generated by up-conversion processes in the erbium-doped fiber pumped at 975 nm. A radiometric analysis was applied to the erbium-doped fiber to evaluate its performance as a temperature sensor, and the results from this analysis were compared against other rare-earth-doped fiber sensors that utilize the intensity ratio technique.
In this work, we propose a novel technique to retrieve 3D shape of dynamic objects by the simultaneous projection of a fringe pattern and a homogeneous white light pattern, both coded in an RGB image. The first one is used to retrieve the phase map by an iterative least-squares method. The second one is used to match object pixels in consecutive images, acquired at various object positions. The proposed method successfully accomplishes the requirement of projecting simultaneously two different patterns. One extracts the object's information while the other retrieves the phase map. Experimental results demonstrate the feasibility of the proposed scheme.
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