Analysis and Improvement HAWC's Core-Fitter
Open Access
- Author:
- Chambers, Landon Martin
- Area of Honors:
- Physics
- Degree:
- Bachelor of Science
- Document Type:
- Thesis
- Thesis Supervisors:
- Tyce De Young, Thesis Supervisor
Tyce De Young, Thesis Supervisor
Dr. Richard Wallace Robinett, Thesis Honors Advisor - Keywords:
- HAWC
Event Reconstruction
Core-fitter - Abstract:
- The High Altitude Water Cherenkov (HAWC) experiment is a gamma-ray observatory currently under construction at the Sierra Negra in Mexico. When operational, HAWC will act as an air shower detector and a TeV transient finder for other detectors (IACTs, neutrino telescopes, gravitational wave detectors.) A core-fitting algorithm finds the center, or core, of an air shower. A good core-fitting algorithm should improve the angular resolution of HAWC. Using a simulation of HAWC, we modified the parameters and convergence criteria of the core-fitter. After making these modifications, we noted the effects in core position error and angular resolution for HAWC's reconstruction of air showers, based upon whether the core of an air shower is located on the detector (on-detector event) or off of the detector (off-detector event). The angular resolution increased by ~27% for off-detector events, and there was a ~69% decrease in the mean core error for off-detector events. As expected, large improvements in core position reconstruction resulted in better angular resolution. However, these modifications made HAWC's reconstruction of on-detector events slightly worse. There was ~0.15% decrease in the angular resolution of on-detector events, even though there was a ~3% decrease in mean core error for such events. These modifications made on HAWC's core-fitter also increase the amount of computation time required for air shower reconstruction by $sim 16\%$. Although these modifications improved HAWC's angular resolution for off-detector events, further optimization on the core-fitter needs to be performed on to ensure that HAWC performs optimal air shower reconstruction.