The major upgrade of the MAGIC telescopes, Part II: A performance study using observations of the Crab Nebula

Abstract

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 ~50GeV. The integral sensitivity for point-like sources with Crab Nebula-like spectrum above 220GeV is (0.66+/-0.03)% of Crab Nebula flux in 50 h of observations. The angular resolution, defined as the sigma of a 2-dimensional Gaussian distribution, at those energies is < 0.07 degree, 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.

21 pages, 25 figures, accepted for publication in Astroparticle Physics

References in corpus (8)

• Observations of the Crab Nebula with H.E.S.S
• Gamma-ray flares from the Crab Nebula
• Discovery of Powerful Gamma-Ray Flares from the Crab Nebula
• VHE Gamma-Ray Observation of the Crab Nebula and its Pulsar with the MAGIC telescope
• A connection between star formation activity and cosmic rays in the starburst galaxy M 82
• Implementation of the Random Forest Method for the Imaging Atmospheric Cherenkov Telescope MAGIC
• Unfolding of differential energy spectra in the MAGIC experiment
• Monte Carlo Studies of Geomagnetic Field Effects on the Imaging Air Cherenkov Technique for the MAGIC Telescope Site

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