Statistical Tools for Imaging Atmospheric Cherenkov Telescopes

Abstract

The development of Imaging Atmospheric Cherenkov Telescopes (IACTs) unveiled the sky in the teraelectronvolt regime, initiating the so-called "TeV revolution", at the beginning of the new millennium. This revolution was also facilitated by the implementation and adaptation of statistical tools for analyzing the shower images collected by these telescopes and inferring the properties of the astrophysical sources that produce such events. Image reconstruction techniques, background discrimination, and signal-detection analyses are just a few of the pioneering studies applied in recent decades in the analysis of IACTs data. This (succinct) review has the intent of summarizing the most common statistical tools that are used for analyzing data collected with IACTs, focusing on their application in the full analysis chain, including references to existing literature for a deeper examination.

25 pages, 10 figures, published in MDPI - Universe Special Issue "High-Energy Gamma-Ray Astronomy: Results on Fundamental Questions after 30 Years of Ground-Based Observations", 29 January 2022

References in corpus (20)

• Observations of the Crab Nebula with H.E.S.S
• The major upgrade of the MAGIC telescopes, Part II: A performance study using observations of the Crab Nebula
• Background Modelling in Very-High-Energy gamma-ray Astronomy
• The First VERITAS Telescope
• Implementation of the Random Forest Method for the Imaging Atmospheric Cherenkov Telescope MAGIC
• Evaluation of three methods for calculating statistical significance when incorporating a systematic uncertainty into a test of the background-only hypothesis for a Poisson process
• Gamma-Hadron Separation in Very-High-Energy gamma-ray astronomy using a multivariate analysis method
• Improved iterative Bayesian unfolding
• Unfolding of differential energy spectra in the MAGIC experiment
• Open statistical issues in particle physics
• A new analysis strategy for detection of faint gamma-ray sources with Imaging Atmospheric Cherenkov Telescopes
• Improved $\gamma$/hadron separation for the detection of faint gamma-ray sources using boosted decision trees
• Imaging Very High Energy Gamma-Ray Telescopes
• A Run-Wise Simulation and Analysis Framework for Imaging Atmospheric Cherenkov Telescope Arrays
• Performance of the MAGIC telescopes in stereoscopic mode
• Handling Systematic Uncertainties and Combined Source Analyses for Atmospheric Cherenkov Telescopes
• Significance in Gamma Ray Astronomy with Systematic Errors
• Objective Bayesian analysis of "on/off" measurements
• A new method of reconstructing very-high-energy gamma-ray spectra: the Template Background Spectrum
• The optimal on-source region size for detections with counting-type telescopes