Detection of vertical muons with the HAWC water Cherenkov detectors and its application to gamma/hadron discrimination

Understand

The HAWC observatory reconstructs atmospheric showers induced by very high-energy primary cosmic- or gamma-rays.

• Cosmic-rays with hadronic nature are several orders of magnitude more frequent than primary gammas and therefore it is necessary to perform the best gamma-hadron discrimination for each event to be able to survey the gamma-ray sky.
• Single vertical muons cause very characteristic signals in the 300 HAWC detectors.
• Particularly, those events that produce signals in the four PMTs of a tank corresponding to muons traversing the tank in the central region.