Search for point sources of ultra-high energy photons with the Telescope Array surface detector

Autor: Yasunori Saito, Yuichiro Tameda, John N. Matthews, G. Furlich, Takaaki Ishii, Takayuki Tomida, Heungsu Shin, D. C. Rodriguez, Fumio Kakimoto, Hideki Tanaka, Hideyuki Ohoka, Pierre Sokolsky, Elliott Barcikowski, M. Takeda, Shigehiro Nagataki, Yana Zhezher, K. Hibino, Dmitri Ivanov, Douglas Bergman, Hideaki Shimodaira, Hyoming Jeong, Keijiro Mukai, Younghoon Kwon, T. Suzawa, K. Martens, Eiji Kido, Kenta Yashiro, M. V. Kuznetsov, K. Tsutsumi, Kazuhiro Machida, K. Yamazaki, Isaac Myers, Sergey Troitsky, K. H. Lee, Grigory Rubtsov, T.-A. Shibata, Hidemi Ito, J. Remington, Gordon Thomson, BayarJon Paul Lubsandorzhiev, K. Kasahara, Tom Stroman, Shoichi Kishigami, Robert Cady, Mayuko Minamino, John Belz, Hiroyuki Sagawa, Kiyoshi Tanaka, Kuzmin, Maxim Pshirkov, K. Honda, J. H. Kim, Toshio Seki, Y. Uchihori, Kei Nakai, Masaaki Tanaka, Naoaki Hayashida, Akitoshi Oshima, Y. Tsunesada, Y. Omura, Fumiya Shibata, Masaomi Ono, Toshiyuki Nonaka, R. Sahara, M. Allen, Takashi Sako, R. Ishimori, Hongsu Kim, Toru Nakamura, Kohei Yada, Igor Tkachev, Kenichi Kadota, Inkyu Park, Shingo Kawana, Jyunsei Chiba, Dongsu Ryu, H. Oda, T. Fujii, Keitaro Fujita, Y. Takagi, Akimichi Taketa, Ben Stokes, Tareq Abu-Zayyad, N. Inoue, B. G. Cheon, H. Kawai, B. K. Shin, M. Ohnishi, Federico R. Urban, S. Udo, C. C. H. Jui, Oleg Kalashev, William Hanlon, S. B. Thomas, S. Kawakami, T. Okuda, Rasha Abbasi, Seok Ho Jeong, J. Yang, L. M. Scott, Y. Hayashi, M. Yamamoto, Priti Shah, K. Kawata, Zach Zundel, Nobuyuki Sakurai, Ryota Onogi, A. Di Matteo, Daisuke Ikeda, Ryota Fujiwara, R. Mayta, S. R. Stratton, Tiffany Wong, Naoto Sakaki, R. Takeishi, Ryo Nakamura, Kazuo Saito, Masaki Fukushima, H. Yoshii, R. Azuma, T. Matsuyama, S. Ozawa, Masato Takita, H. Yamaoka, Michiyuki Chikawa, H. Tokuno, J. D. Smith, Peter Tinyakov, Samuel Blake, Shoichi Ogio, Yuta Tanoue, Motoki Hayashi, J. P. Lundquist, Koichi Sekino, Y. Takahashi, Mai Takamura, M. Abe
Rok vydání: 2019
Předmět:
DOI: 10.48550/arxiv.1904.00300
Popis: The surface detector (SD) of the Telescope Array (TA) experiment allows one to indirectly detect photons with energies of order $10^{18}$ eV and higher and to separate photons from the cosmic-ray background. In this paper we present the results of a blind search for point sources of ultra-high energy (UHE) photons in the Northern sky using the TA SD data. The photon-induced extensive air showers (EAS) are separated from the hadron-induced EAS background by means of a multivariate classifier based upon 16 parameters that characterize the air shower events. No significant evidence for the photon point sources is found. The upper limits are set on the flux of photons from each particular direction in the sky within the TA field of view, according to the experiment's angular resolution for photons. Average 95% C.L. upper limits for the point-source flux of photons with energies greater than $10^{18}$, $10^{18.5}$, $10^{19}$, $10^{19.5}$ and $10^{20}$ eV are $0.094$, $0.029$, $0.010$, $0.0073$ and $0.0058$ km$^{-2}$yr$^{-1}$ respectively. For the energies higher than $10^{18.5}$ eV, the photon point-source limits are set for the first time. Numerical results for each given direction in each energy range are provided as a supplement to this paper.
Comment: accepted to MNRAS, 11 pages, 4 figures, 2 tables; results in text-file format are supplemented to paper source
Databáze: OpenAIRE