Observations of Extragalactic Sources with the MAGIC Telescope

MAGIC is currently the world's largest single dish ground based imaging atmospheric Cherenkov telescope. During the first year of operation, more than 20 extragalactic sources have been observed and several of them detected. Here we present results of analyzed data, including discussion about spectral and temporal properties of the detected sources. In addition, we discuss implications of the measured energy spectra of distant sources for our knowledge of the extragalactic background light.Comment: to appear in proceedings of Multi Messenger conference, Barcelona, July 4-7, 200

Axion-like particle imprint in cosmological very-high-energy sources

Discoveries of very high energy (VHE) photons from distant blazars suggest that, after correction by extragalactic background light (EBL) absorption, there is a flatness or even a turn-up in their spectra at the highest energies that cannot be easily explained by the standard framework. Here, it is shown that a possible solution to this problem is achieved by assuming the existence of axion-like particles (ALPs) with masses ~1 neV. The ALP scenario is tested making use of observations of the highest redshift blazars known in the VHE energy regime, namely 3C 279, 3C 66A, PKS 1222+216 and PG 1553+113. In all cases, better fits to the observed spectra are found when including ALPs rather than considering EBL only. Interestingly, quite similar critical energies for photon/ALP conversions are also derived, independently of the source considered.Comment: 12 pages, 2 figures, 2 tables; accepted by JCAP. Replaced to match the accepted versio

Upgrade of the MAGIC Telescope with a Multiplexed Fiber-Optic 2 GSamples/s FADC Data Acquisition system

In February 2007 the MAGIC Air Cherenkov Telescope for gamma ray astronomy was fully upgraded with a fast 2 GSamples/s digitization system. The upgraded readout system uses a novel fiber-optic multiplexing technique. It consists of 10-bit 2 GSamples/s FADCs to digitize 16 channels consecutively and optical fibers to delay the analog signals. A distributed data acquisition system using GBit Ethernet and FiberChannel technology allows to read out the 100 kByte events with a continuous rate of up to 1 kHz.Comment: 4 pages, 6 figures, to appear in the proceedings of the 30th International Cosmic Ray Conference, Merida, July 200

Dark Matter signals from Draco and Willman 1: Prospects for MAGIC II and CTA

The next generation of ground-based Imaging Air Cherenkov Telescopes (IACTs) will play an important role in indirect dark matter searches. In this article, we consider two particularly promising candidate sources for dark matter annihilation signals, the nearby dwarf galaxies Draco and Willman 1, and study the prospects of detecting such a signal for the soon-operating MAGIC II telescope system as well as for the planned installation of CTA, taking special care of describing the experimental features that affect the detectional prospects. For the first time in such a study, we fully take into account the effect of internal bremsstrahlung, which has recently been shown to considerably enhance, in some cases, the gamma-ray flux at the high energies where Atmospheric Cherenkov Telescopes operate, thus leading to significantly harder annihilation spectra than traditionally considered. While the detection of the spectral features introduced by internal bremsstrahlung would constitute a smoking gun signature for dark matter annihilation, we find that for most models the overall flux still remains at a level that will be challenging to detect unless one adopts rather (though by no means overly) optimistic astrophysical assumptions about the distribution of dark matter in the dwarfs.Comment: 10 pages, 4 figures, minor changes, matches the published version (JCAP

Sensitivity for tau neutrinos at PeV energies and beyond with the MAGIC telescopes

The MAGIC telescopes, located at the Roque de los Muchachos Observatory (2200 a.s.l.) in the Canary Island of La Palma, are placed on the top of a mountain, from where a window of visibility of about 5 deg in zenith and 80 deg in azimuth is open in the direction of the surrounding ocean. This permits to search for a signature of particle showers induced by earth-skimming cosmic tau neutrinos in the PeV to EeV energy range arising from the ocean. We have studied the response of MAGIC to such events, employing Monte Carlo simulations of upward-going tau neutrino showers. The analysis of the shower images shows that air showers induced by tau neutrinos can be discriminated from the hadronic background coming from a similar direction. We have calculated the point source acceptance and the expected event rates, assuming an incoming tau neutrino flux consistent with IceCube measurements, and for a sample of generic neutrino fluxes from photo-hadronic interactions in AGNs. The analysis of about 30 hours of data taken toward the sea leads to a point source sensitivity for tau neutrinos at the level of the down-going point source analysis of the Pierre Auger Observatory.Comment: Proceedings of the 35th International Cosmic Ray Conference (ICRC 2017), Bexco, Busan, Korea,(arXiv:1708.05153