Gamma rays, electrons and positrons up to 3 TeV with the Fermi Gamma-ray Space Telescope

Abstract

The Fermi Gamma-ray Space Telescope (formerly known as Gamma-ray Large Area Space Telescope, GLAST) was successfully launched on June 11 2008. Its main instrument is the Large Area Telescope (LAT), which detects gamma rays from 20 MeV to more than 300 GeV. It is a pair-conversion telescope with 16 identical towers (tracker and calorimeter), covered by an anti-coincidence detector to reject charged particles. The calorimeter is a hodoscopic array of CsI(Tl) crystals, arranged in 8 alternating orthogonal layers, with a total thickness of 8.6 radiation lengths. In this paper we will present the performance of the LAT, with special attention to the calorimeter, which provides a good energy measurement up to 3 TeV. We will also review some of its scientific results after 4 years of operation, focusing on measurements which extend up to very high energy, such as the spectrum of the extragalactic diffuse emission, the spectrum of cosmic electrons and the positron fraction.

Presented at the XVth International Conference on Calorimetry in High Energy Physics (CALOR 2012), Santa Fe, New Mexico, USA, June 4-8 2012. The proceedings will be published in Journal of Physics: Conference Series. 12 pages

References in corpus (3)

• The Second Catalog of Active Galactic Nuclei Detected by the Fermi Large Area Telescope
• Measurement of separate cosmic-ray electron and positron spectra with the Fermi Large Area Telescope
• In-flight measurement of the absolute energy scale of the Fermi Large Area Telescope

Cited by in corpus (5)

• Updated Search for Spectral Lines from Galactic Dark Matter Interactions with Pass 8 Data from the Fermi Large Area Telescope
• Cosmic-ray electron+positron spectrum from 7 GeV to 2 TeV with the Fermi Large Area Telescope
• Fermi Large Area Telescope Performance After 10 Years Of Operation
• Multi-messenger gamma-ray counterpart of the IceCube neutrino signal
• A review of Cosmic-ray electrons and fermi-LAT