The Fermi Large Area Telescope

Abstract

The Large Area Telescope, the primary instrument on the Fermi Gamma-ray Space Telescope, is an imaging, wide field-of-view gamma-ray telescope. After many improvements to the data acquisition and event analysis procedures, it now covers the broad energy range from $\sim 20$ MeV to $\sim 2$ TeV. After more than 13 years of operation since its launch in June 11, 2008, it has provided the best-resolved and deepest portrait of the gamma-ray sky. In this chapter we review the design of the instrument, the data acquisition system, calibration, and performance.

30 pages, 11 figures; Invited chapter for Handbook of X-ray and Gamma-ray Astrophysics (Eds. C. Bambi and A. Santangelo, Springer Singapore, expected in 2022)

References in corpus (5)

• An Ordinary Short Gamma-Ray Burst with Extraordinary Implications: Fermi-GBM Detection of GRB 170817A
• The Electromagnetic Counterpart of the Binary Neutron Star Merger LIGO/VIRGO GW170817. II. UV, Optical, and Near-IR Light Curves and Comparison to Kilonova Models
• Fermi Large Area Telescope Performance After 10 Years Of Operation
• The Anti-Coincidence Detector for the GLAST Large Area Telescope
• Search for Cosmic-Ray Electron and Positron Anisotropies with Seven Years of Fermi Large Area Telescope Data