Detecting Gamma Rays with High Resolution and Moderate Field of View: The Air Cherenkov Technique

The Imaging Atmospheric Cherenkov technique allows us to detect very high-energy gamma rays from few tens of GeV to hundreds of TeV using ground-based instrumentation. At these energies, a gamma ray generates a shower of secondary particles when it enters the Earth’s atmosphere. These particles emit the Cherenkov light in the visible and near-UV ranges. The Cherenkov light produced by the shower reaches the ground as a short pulse of a few nanosecond duration over a large circle of around 100 m radius (a light pool). This pulse of light can be imaged with telescopes provided with fast photodetectors and electronics. Combining the images of several telescopes distributed over this light pool allows us to estimate the gamma-ray energy and incident direction and to reject gamma rays from the strong background of charged cosmic raysCosmic rays. The collection area of an array of a few telescopes is of the order of the area of the light pool, i.e., >105 m2. Such an array reaches a sensitivity of a few millicrabs at 100 GeV energies in 50 h of observations, an angular resolution of ∼5 arcmin, and a spectral resolution of ∼10%. This chapter describes the technical implementation of Imaging Atmospheric Cherenkov telescopes and also describes how the data are analyzed to reconstruct the physical parameters of the primary gamma rays.