Speaker
Description
The High-Altitude Water Cherenkov (HAWC) Observatory is located on the slopes of Sierra Negra volcano in Mexico at an altitude of 4,100 m above sea level. HAWC is a wide-field-of-view detector designed to observe very-high-energy (VHE) gamma rays in the energy range from hundreds of GeV to beyond 100 TeV, while operating with a duty cycle greater than 95%. Since the start of full operations in 2015, HAWC has continuously monitored the VHE sky, providing an unprecedented dataset for long-term variability studies of persistent gamma-ray sources. In this work, we present a statistical characterization of the variability of the blazars Markarian 421 and Markarian 501 using approximately 10 years of daily HAWC observations spanning the period from 2015 to 2024, representing the longest continuous wide-field monitoring dataset analyzed for these sources at VHE energies. We investigate the statistical properties of their variability, characterize their flux distributions, identify active and flaring states, and discuss the implications of these results for models of particle acceleration and gamma-ray emission in blazar jets. This work was supported by UNAM-PAPIIT IG100726.