Ground-based gamma-ray astronomy has had a major breakthrough with the impressive results obtained using systems of imaging atmospheric Cherenkov telescopes. Ground-based gamma-ray astronomy has a huge potential in astrophysics, particle physics and cosmology. CTA is an international initiative to build the next generation instrument, with a factor of 5-10 improvement in sensitivity in the 100 GeV-10 TeV range and the extension to energies well below 100 GeV and above 100 TeV. CTA will consist of two arrays (one in the north, one in the south) for full sky coverage and will be operated as open observatory. The design of CTA is based on currently available technology. This document reports on the status and presents the major design concepts of CTA.

The blazar Mrk 501 was observed at energies above 0.10 TeV with the MAGIC Telescope from 2005 May through July. The high sensitivity of the instrument enabled the determination of the flux and spectrum of the source on a night-by-night basis. Throughout our observational campaign, the flux from Mrk 501 was found to vary by an order of magnitude. Intranight flux variability with flux-doubling times down to 2 minutes was observed during the two most active nights, namely, June 30 and July 9. These are the fastest flux variations ever observed in Mrk 501. The similar to 20 minute long flare of July 9 showed an indication of a 4 +/- 1 minute time delay between the peaks of F(< 0.25 TeV) and F(> 1.2 TeV), which may indicate a progressive acceleration of electrons in the emitting plasma blob. The flux variability was quantified for several energy ranges and found to increase with the energy of the gamma-ray photons. The spectra hardened significantly with increasing flux, and during the two most active nights, a spectral peak was clearly detected at 0.43 +/- 0.06 and 0.25 +/- 0.07 TeV, respectively, for June 30 and July 9. There is no evidence of such a spectral feature for the other nights at energies down to 0.10 TeV, thus suggesting that the spectral peak is correlated with the source luminosity. These observed characteristics could be accommodated in a synchrotron self-Compton framework in which the increase in gamma-ray flux is produced by a freshly injected ( high energy) electron population

The Cherenkov Telescope Array (CTA) is a new observatory for very high-energy (VHE) gamma rays. CTA has ambitions science goals, for which it is necessary to achieve full-sky coverage, to improve the sensitivity by about an order of magnitude, to span about four decades of energy, from a few tens of GeV to above 100 TeV with enhanced angular and energy resolutions over existing VHE gamma-ray observatories. An international collaboration has formed with more than 1000 members from 27 countries in Europe, Asia, Africa and North and South America. In 2010 the CTA Consortium completed a Design Study and started a three-year Preparatory Phase which leads to production readiness of CTA in 2014. In this paper we introduce the science goals and the concept of CTA, and provide an overview of the project. ?? 2013 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved

MAGIC is a system of two Imaging Atmospheric Cherenkov Telescopes located in the Canary island of La Palma, Spain. During summer 2011 and 2012 it underwent a series of upgrades, involving the exchange of the MAGIC-I camera and its trigger system, as well as the upgrade of the readout system of both telescopes. We use observations of the Crab Nebula taken at low and medium zenith angles to assess the key performance parameters of the MAGIC stereo system. For low zenith angle observations, the standard trigger threshold of the MAGIC telescopes is ∼ 50 GeV. The integral sensitivity for point-like sources with Crab Nebula-like spectrum above 220 GeV is (0.66 ± 0.03)% of Crab Nebula flux in 50 h of observations. The angular resolution, defined as the σ of a 2-dimensional Gaussian distribution, at those energies is ≲ 0.07°, while the energy resolution is 16%. We also re-evaluate the effect of the systematic uncertainty on the data taken with the MAGIC telescopes after the upgrade. We estimate that the systematic uncertainties can be divided in the following components: < 15% in energy scale, 11%-18% in flux normalization and ± 0.15 for the energy spectrum power-law slope

Microquasars are binary star systems with relativistic radio-emitting jets. They are potential sources of cosmic rays and can be used to elucidate the physics of relativistic jets. We report the detection of variable gamma-ray emission above 100 gigaelectron volts from the microquasar LS I +61 303. Six orbital cycles were recorded. Several detections occur at a similar orbital phase, which suggests that the emission is periodic. The strongest gamma-ray emission is not observed when the two stars are closest to one another, implying a strong orbital modulation of the emission or absorption processes

We report on the γ -ray activity of the high-synchrotron-peaked BL Lacertae object Markarian 421 (Mrk 421) during the first 1.5 years of Fermi operation, from 2008 August 5 to 2010 March 12. We find that the Large Area Telescope (LAT) γ -ray spectrum above 0.3 GeV can be well described by a power-law function with photon index Γ = 1.78 ± 0.02 and average photon flux F (>0.3 GeV) = (7.23 ± 0.16) × 10 −8 ph cm −2 s −1 . Over this time period, the Fermi-LAT spectrum above 0.3 GeV was evaluated on seven-day-long time intervals, showing significant variations in the photon flux (up to a factor ∼3 from the minimum to the maximum flux) but mild spectral variations. The variability amplitude at X-ray frequencies measured by RXTE/ASM and Swift/BAT is substantially larger than that in γ -rays measured by Fermi-LAT, and these two energy ranges are not significantly correlated. We also present the first results from the 4.5 month long multifrequency campaign on Mrk 421, which included the VLBA, Swift, RXTE, MAGIC, the F-GAMMA, GASP-WEBT, and other collaborations and instruments that provided excellent temporal and energy coverage of the source throughout the entire campaign During this campaign, Mrk 421 showed a low activity at all wavebands. The extensive multi-instrument (radio to TeV) data set provides an unprecedented, complete look at the quiescent spectral energy distribution (SED) for this source. The broadband SED was reproduced with a leptonic (one-zone synchrotron self-Compton) and a hadronic model (synchrotron proton blazar). Both frameworks are able to describe the average SED reasonably well, implying comparable jet powers but very different characteristics for the blazar emission site.

We report about very high energy (VHE) gamma-ray observations of the Crab Nebula with the MAGIC telescope. The gamma-ray flux from the nebula was measured between 60 GeV and 9 TeV. The energy spectrum is parameterized with a power low. The peak in the spectral energy distribution is estimated at (77 +/- 35) GeV. Within the observation time and the experimental resolution of the telescope, the gamma-ray emission is steady and pointlike. The emission's center of gravity coincides with the position of the pulsar. Pulsed gamma-ray emission from the pulsar could not be detected. We constrain the cutoff energy of the pulsed spectrum to be less than 27 GeV, assuming that the differential energy spectrum has an exponential cutoff. For a superexponential shape, the cutoff energy can be as high as 60 GeV

Very high energy (VHE) γ-ray emission from the flat spectrum radio quasar (FSRQ) PKS 1222+21 (4C 21.35, z = 0.432) was detected with the MAGIC Cherenkov telescopes during a short observation (∼0.5 hr) performed on 2010 June 17. The MAGIC detection coincides with high-energy MeV/GeV γ-ray activity measured by the Large Area Telescope (LAT) on board the Fermi satellite. The VHE spectrum measured by MAGIC extends from about 70 GeV up to at least 400 GeV and can be well described by a power-law dN/dE ∝ E −Γ with a photon index Γ = 3.75 ± 0.27 stat ± 0.2 syst. The averaged integral flux above 100 GeV is (4.6 ± 0.5) × 10 −10 cm −2 s −1 (∼1 Crab Nebula flux). The VHE flux measured by MAGIC varies significantly within the 30 minute exposure implying a flux doubling time of about 10 minutes. The VHE and MeV/GeV spectra, corrected for the absorption by the extragalactic background light (EBL), can be described by a single power law with photon index 2.72 ± 0.34 between 3 GeV and 400 GeV, and is consistent with emission belonging to a single component in the jet. The