HAWC: Design, Operation, Reconstruction and Analysis

Understand

The High-Altitude Water Cherenkov (HAWC) Observatory was completed and began full opera- tion on March 20, 2015.

• The detector consists of an array of 300 water tanks, each containing 200 ktons of purified water and instrumented with 4 PMTs.
• Located at an elevation of 4100m a.s.l.
• near the Sierra Negra volcano in central Mexico, HAWC has a threshold for gamma-ray detection well below 1 TeV and a sensitivity to TeV-scale gamma-ray sources an order of magnitude better than previous air-shower arrays.