IIHE topical seminar: Very High Energy Cosmic Ray Observations with the HAWC Detector

abstract: The High Altitude Water Cherenkov (HAWC) Observatory has been fully operational since its inauguration on 20 March 2015. Located at an elevation of 4100m a.s.l. near the Sierra Negra volcano in central Mexico, the detector consists of an array of 300 water tanks, each containing ~200 tons of purified water. Each tank is instrumented with four upward-facing photomultipliers to measure the Cherenkov radiation from charged air shower particles produced by primary particles. With its high duty cycle and large field of view (~2 sr), HAWC opens a new window for survey observations of gamma rays and cosmic rays in the very high energy (VHE) range (100 GeV - 1 PeV), facilitating studies of Galactic and extragalactic particle accelerators. In this presentation, I will discuss recent results of TeV gamma ray and cosmic ray measurements from HAWC’s first year of data, including a measurement of the all-particle flux and the energy dependence of the cosmic-ray anisotropy and moon shadow. I will also describe the various methodologies used in HAWC cosmic-ray analyses, including a Bayesian spectral unfolding procedure.