Speaker
Michael Punch
(Linnéuniversitetet)
Description
Very High Energy gamma-ray astrophysics is a dynamic field which involves the study of extreme accelerators in our Universe, such as active galactic nuclei, starburst galaxies, supernova remnants, pulsars or x-ray binaries. This gives us access to information both on astrophysics questions such as on the origin of cosmic rays or the density of extragalactic background light, and also some fundamental questions in physics such as dark matter or Lorentz invariance violation tests.
The Cherenkov Telescope Array is the next huge step for this domain, and will image the sky in the high energy gamma-ray band from a few tens of GeV to tens of TeV, with the goal to increase the instrumental sensitivity by a factor of ten with respect to current arrays, and with much improved angular and energy resolution. It is a global effort (27 nations, 1000 scientists and engineers), collaborating to build ~100 telescopes of several sizes to cover overlapping energy ranges, with one site in each hemisphere for all-sky coverage. It will be an open observatory with calls for proposals and open data and analysis tools.
The field of Gamma-ray astrophysics will be summarized on both the technical and physics aspects, and the gains which CTA will bring will then be described.
