A Search for Very High Energy Photons from Gamma-Ray Bursts with the High Altitude Water Cherenkov Observatory
Open Access
- Author:
- Rosenberg, Matthew
- Graduate Program:
- Physics
- Degree:
- Doctor of Philosophy
- Document Type:
- Dissertation
- Date of Defense:
- October 01, 2019
- Committee Members:
- Miguel Alejandro Mostafa, Dissertation Advisor/Co-Advisor
Miguel Alejandro Mostafa, Committee Chair/Co-Chair
Stephane Coutu, Committee Member
Kohta Murase, Committee Member
Peter Istvan Meszaros, Outside Member
Richard Wallace Robinett, Program Head/Chair - Keywords:
- HAWC
high-energy astrophysics
gamma rays
gamma-ray bursts - Abstract:
- Gamma-Ray Bursts (GRBs) are brief, intense flashes of gamma rays lasting from a fraction of a second to minutes. The prompt emission from these explosive events outshines all the stars in their entire host galaxy. Thought to be produced by the core collapse of massive stars and the merger of compact stellar remnants in distant galaxies, GRBs can liberate on the order of 10^54 ergs of gravitational potential energy in just milliseconds. In addition to constituting an interesting phenomenon in their own right, these cosmic engines accelerate particles to energy scales unattainable in laboratories on Earth and thus provide a potentially interesting probe of fundamental physics as well as source candidates for ultra-high energy cosmic rays. We present recent efforts to extend the observation of GRBs beyond ~100 GeV with the High Altitude Water Cherenkov (HAWC) observatory. Located in Puebla, Mexico at a latitude of 19 degrees north and an altitude of 4100 meters above sea level, HAWC employs a 20,000 square meter array of 300 water Cherenkov detectors to observe the relativistic charged particles produced in the extensive air showers that develop upon the collision of high-energy gamma rays with Earth’s atmosphere. This technique provides sensitivity to ~100 GeV – 100 TeV gamma rays, allows for nearly continuous operations, and achieves a wide instantaneous field of view of ~2 sr that allows for daily monitoring of the northern sky. HAWC is thus ideally suited to capture any emission above ~100 GeV from transient events like GRBs. As GRB photons above a few TeV in energy are likely to be absorbed by the extra-galactic background light before reaching Earth, HAWC’s ~100 GeV – 1 TeV data is of prime importance in the search for high-energy GRB emission. However, the small air-shower data necessary to achieve this lower threshold of ~100 GeV has previously been poorly modeled in HAWC simulations and has therefore not been used in past HAWC GRB searches. We will show that these modeling discrepancies were caused by an inaccurate treatment of detector noise, outline a solution that allows HAWC to achieve its lowest possible energy threshold, and present a method to reduce the impact of detector noise on HAWC’s angular resolution in this newly recovered small air-shower data. Along with new GRB search algorithms, these improvements provide up to an order of magnitude improvement in HAWC’s sensitivity to gamma-ray bursts. We use these new techniques to scan archival HAWC data for gamma-ray emission coincident with GRBs detected by the Fermi and Swift satellites between December 2014 and April 2018. While no significant detections were found, a comparison of our upper limits on the flux above 100 GeV from GRBs 170206A and 171120A with Fermi measurements suggests a cut-off or spectral steepening below that energy under a redshift assumption of z less than ~0.3. However, these limits are not sufficiently strict to compellingly constrain GRB models with predictions for TeV scale gamma-ray emission.