Design and expected performance of a novel hybrid detector for very-high-energy gamma astrophysics

Abstract

Current detectors for Very-High-Energy $\gamma$-ray astrophysics are either pointing instruments with a small field of view (Cherenkov telescopes), or large field-of-view instruments with relatively large energy thresholds (extensive air shower detectors). In this article, we propose a new hybrid extensive air shower detector sensitive in an energy region starting from about 100 GeV. The detector combines a small water-Cherenkov detector, able to provide a calorimetric measurement of shower particles at ground, with resistive plate chambers which contribute significantly to the accurate shower geometry reconstruction. A full simulation of this detector concept shows that it is able to reach better sensitivity than any previous gamma-ray wide field-of-view experiment in the sub-TeV energy region. It is expected to detect with a $5\sigma$ significance a source fainter than the Crab Nebula in one year at $100$GeV and, above $1$TeV a source as faint as 10\% of it. As such, this instrument is suited to detect transient phenomena making it a very powerful tool to trigger observations of variable sources and to detect transients coupled to gravitational waves and gamma-ray bursts.

10 pages, v4: correct small typo in eq. 1 which does not affect the paper results (calculations and plots)

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• Progress in End-to-End Optimization of Detectors for Fundamental Physics with Differentiable Programming
• Detecting gamma-rays with moderate resolution and large field of view: Particle detector arrays and water Cherenkov technique
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• New methods to reconstruct $X_{\max }$ and the energy of gamma-ray air showers with high accuracy in large wide-field observatories
• Future developments in ground-based gamma-ray astronomy