Speaker
Description
The High-Altitude Water-Cherenkov (HAWC) experiment is a TeV gamma-ray
observatory located at 4100 m above sea level on the Sierra Negra mountain in
Puebla, Mexico. Each of the detector's 300 water-filled tanks is instrumented
with four photomultiplier tubes that detect the Cherenkov radiation produced by
charged particles created in extensive air showers. With an instantaneous
field of view of 2 sr and a duty cycle exceeding 95%, HAWC is a powerful survey
instrument sensitive to pulsar wind nebulae, supernova remnants, active
galactic nuclei, and other gamma-ray sources. The mechanisms of particle
acceleration at these sites can be probed by measuring their emitted photon
energy spectra. To this end, we have developed an event-by-event method for
reconstructing the energies of HAWC gamma-ray events using an artificial neural
network. We will show that this new technique greatly improves HAWC's energy
resolution and enables it to precisely resolve energies as high as 100 TeV in
Monte Carlo. We will also present the progress towards measuring high-energy
spectra with the new energy-estimation method.
