Limits on the Diffuse Gamma-Ray Background with HAWC

© Copyright owned by the author(s) under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License (CC BY-NC-ND 4.0)The high-energy Diffuse Gamma-Ray Background (DGRB) is expected to be produced by unresolved extra-galactic objects such as active galactic nuclei, starburst galaxies and gamma-ray bursts. At TeV energies, observations or stringent limits on the DGRB could have significant multi-messenger implications, such as constraining the origin of TeV-PeV astrophysical neutrinos detected by IceCube. With its continuous sensitivity to gamma rays from a few hundred GeV to several hundred TeV and its wide field-of-view, the High Altitude Water Cherenkov (HAWC) observatory is well-suited to significantly improve searches for the DGRB. In this work, strict cuts have been applied to the HAWC dataset to better isolate gamma-ray air showers from background hadronic showers. The sensitivity to the DGRB was then verified using 535 days of Crab data and Monte Carlo simulations, leading to new limits on the DGRB >10 TeV.

Limits on the Diffuse Gamma-Ray Background with HAWC Academic Article in Scopus