Prospective study on observations of γ-ray sources in the Galaxy using the HADAR experiment

Abstract

The High Altitude Detection of Astronomical Radiation (HADAR) experiment is a refracting terrestrial telescope array based on the atmospheric Cherenkov imaging technique. It focuses the Cherenkov light emitted by extensive air showers through a large aperture water-lens system for observing very-high-energy γ-rays and cosmic rays. With the advantages of a large field-of-view (FOV) and low energy threshold, the HADAR experiment operates in a large-scale sky scanning mode to observe galactic sources. This study presents the prospects of using the HADAR experiment for the sky survey of TeV γ-ray sources from TeVCat and provids a one-year survey of statistical significance. Results from the simulation show that a total of 23 galactic point sources, including five supernova remnant sources and superbubbles, four pulsar wind nebula sources, and 14 unidentified sources, were detected in the HADAR FOV with a significance greater than 5 standard deviations (σ). The statistical significance for the Crab Nebula during one year of operation reached 346.0 σ and the one-year integral sensitivity of HADAR above 1 TeV was ~1.3%–2.4% of the flux from the Crab Nebula.

Graphical abstract

Keywords

HADAR / Galactic sources / significance / gamma rays

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Acknowledgements

We acknowledge the support from the National Natural Science Foundation of China (Nos. 11873005, 11705103, 12005120, 12147218, U1831208, U1632104, 11875264, and U2031110).

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