Dr
J. Patrick Harding
(Los Alamos National Laboratory)
09/05/2017, 14:30
Gamma Rays - Convenor: Reshmi Mukherjee, Columbia
The High Altitude Water Cherenkov (HAWC) gamma-ray observatory is a wide field-of-view observatory sensitive to 100 GeV – 100 TeV gamma rays and cosmic rays. Located at an elevation of 4100 m on the Sierra Negra volcano in Mexico, HAWC observes extensive air showers from gamma rays via their production of Cherenkov light within an array of water tanks. Through its detection of high-energy...
Dr
Mauricio Bustamante
(Center for Cosmology and Astroparticle Physics, The Ohio State University)
09/05/2017, 14:48
Gamma Rays - Convenor: Reshmi Mukherjee, Columbia
Ultra-high-energy cosmic rays and high-energy astrophysical neutrinos are routinely detected, but their sources remain unknown. Gamma-ray bursts (GRBs) have long been considered attractive candidate sources. Recently, the lack of neutrinos detected in coincidence with known GRBs has motivated revisions of the multi-messenger emission mechanism --- gamma rays, cosmic rays, neutrinos --- from...
Dr
Regina Caputo
(UMD/NASA/GSFC)
09/05/2017, 15:06
Gamma Rays - Convenor: Reshmi Mukherjee, Columbia
The era of precision cosmology has revealed that ~80% of the total amount of matter in the universe is dark matter. One promising candidate, motivated by both particle physics and astrophysics, is the Weakly Interacting Massive Particle (WIMP). WIMPs are predicted to couple to the Standard Model via annihilation or decay. The annihilation or decay products of particular interest are neutrinos...
Xiawei Wang
(Harvard University)
09/05/2017, 15:24
Gamma Rays - Convenor: Reshmi Mukherjee, Columbia
We show that the quasar outflows can naturally account for the missing component of the extragalactic gamma-ray background (EGB) below ~ 1 GeV through neutral pion production in interactions between protons accelerated by the forward outflow shock and interstellar protons. We adopt outflow parameters that best fit the most recent Fermi-LAT data on the EGB and derive a cumulative neutrino...
Brian Humensky
(Columbia University)
09/05/2017, 15:42
Gamma Rays - Convenor: Reshmi Mukherjee, Columbia
Neutrino astronomy is an emerging area of study in high-energy astrophysics, and astrophysical neutrinos are natural cousins of very high energy (VHE; E > 100 GeV) gamma rays. The VERITAS gamma-ray observatory has an active program of follow-up observations in the directions of high-energy neutrinos detected by IceCube which are potentially astrophysical, including prompt alerts, and the...
