The HAWC real-time flare monitor for rapid detection of transient events

Understand

We present the development of a real-time flare monitor for the High Altitude Water Cherenkov (HAWC) observatory.

• The flare monitor has been fully operational since 2017 January and is designed to detect very high energy (VHE; $E\gtrsim100$ GeV) transient events from blazars on time scales lasting from 2 minutes to 10 hours in order to facilitate multiwavelength and multimessenger studies.
• These flares provide information for investigations into the mechanisms that power the blazars' relativistic jets and accelerate particles within them, and they may also serve as probes of the populations of particles and fields in intergalactic space.
• To date, the detection of blazar flares in the VHE range has relied primarily on pointed observations by imaging atmospheric Cherenkov telescopes.