22 research outputs found

    Southern African Large Telescope Spectroscopy of BL Lacs for the CTA project

    Get PDF
    In the last two decades, very-high-energy gamma-ray astronomy has reached maturity: over 200 sources have been detected, both Galactic and extragalactic, by ground-based experiments. At present, Active Galactic Nuclei (AGN) make up about 40% of the more than 200 sources detected at very high energies with ground-based telescopes, the majority of which are blazars, i.e. their jets are closely aligned with the line of sight to Earth and three quarters of which are classified as high-frequency peaked BL Lac objects. One challenge to studies of the cosmological evolution of BL Lacs is the difficulty of obtaining redshifts from their nearly featureless, continuum-dominated spectra. It is expected that a significant fraction of the AGN to be detected with the future Cherenkov Telescope Array (CTA) observatory will have no spectroscopic redshifts, compromising the reliability of BL Lac population studies, particularly of their cosmic evolution. We started an effort in 2019 to measure the redshifts of a large fraction of the AGN that are likely to be detected with CTA, using the Southern African Large Telescope (SALT). In this contribution, we present two results from an on-going SALT program focused on the determination of BL Lac object redshifts that will be relevant for the CTA observatory

    A multistep approach for the stratification of the risk of severe hypoglycemia in patients with type 2 diabetes

    No full text
    INTRODUCTION: Hypoglycemia is the major limiting factor in the glycemic management of diabetes. Aim of this study was to produce a risk stratification tool to support the medical decision making, by facilitating the identification of patients at higher risk of hypoglycemia. EVIDENCE ACQUISITION: A multistep approach was adopted, including a systematic review of observational studies investigating risk factors for severe hypoglycemia in type 2 diabetes (T2DM), followed by an expert input forum to identify factors perceived as relevant and at the same time reliably detectable, to be used for the development of a risk score. EVIDENCE SYNTHESIS: The systematic review led to the identification of 41 studies. Many factors have been seldom investigated, and their association with the risk of hypoglycemia is still unclear. Factors more frequently associated with a high risk of hypoglycemia were: low level of education, ethnicity, irregular meals/malnutrition, insulin and sulfonylurea therapy, polypharmacy, previous hypoglycemia, impaired renal function, cognitive impairment, depression and frailty. The expert input forum involved 35 diabetologists. Following the ranking of the relevance of the factors identified, a parsimonious yet comprehensive set of risk factors was identified. CONCLUSIONS: The process led to the identification of relevant factors, to be used for the development of a hypoglycemia risk score. An ad-hoc study will be performed to assess the contribution of these risk factors and their relative weight. If the risk score will confirm its ability to correctly stratify patients according to their risk of hypoglycemia, it will represent a useful support to optimize the care of people with T2DM

    Cherenkov Telescope Array Contributions to the 35th International Cosmic Ray Conference (ICRC2017)

    Full text link
    List of contributions from the Cherenkov Telescope Array Consortium presented at the 35th International Cosmic Ray Conference, July 12-20 2017, Busan, Korea.Comment: Index of Cherenkov Telescope Array conference proceedings at the ICRC2017, Busan, Kore

    Performance of a proposed event-type based analysis for the Cherenkov Telescope Array

    No full text
    The Cherenkov Telescope Array (CTA) will be the next-generation observatory in the field of very-high-energy (20 GeV to 300 TeV) gamma-ray astroparticle physics. Classically, data analysis in the field maximizes sensitivity by applying quality cuts on the data acquired. These cuts, optimized using Monte Carlo simulations, select higher quality events from the initial dataset. Subsequent steps of the analysis typically use the surviving events to calculate one set of instrument response functions (IRFs). An alternative approach is the use of event types, as implemented in experiments such as the Fermi-LAT. In this approach, events are divided into sub-samples based on their reconstruction quality, and a set of IRFs is calculated for each sub-sample. The sub-samples are then combined in a joint analysis, treating them as independent observations. This leads to an improvement in performance parameters such as sensitivity, angular and energy resolution. Data loss is reduced since lower quality events are included in the analysis as well, rather than discarded. In this study, machine learning methods will be used to classify events according to their expected angular reconstruction quality. We will report the impact on CTA high-level performance when applying such an event-type classification, compared to the classical procedure

    Monte Carlo Simulations and Validation of NectarCAM, a Medium Sized Telescope Camera for CTA

    No full text
    The upcoming Cherenkov Telescope Array (CTA) ground-based gamma-ray observatory will open up our view of the very high energy Universe, offering an improvement in sensitivity of 5-10 times that of previous experiments. NectarCAM is one of the proposed cameras for the Medium-Sized Telescopes (MST) which have been designed to cover the core energy range of CTA, from 100 GeV to 10 TeV. The final camera will be capable of GHz sampling and provide a field of view of 8 degrees with its 265 modules of 7 photomultiplier each (for a total of 1855 pixels). In order to validate the performance of NectarCAM, a partially-equipped prototype has been constructed consisting of only the inner 61-modules. It has so far undergone testing at the integration test-bench facility in CEA Paris-Saclay (France) and on a prototype of the MST structure in Adlershof (Germany). To characterize the performance of the prototype, Monte Carlo simulations were conducted using a detailed model of the 61 module camera in the CORSIKA/sim_telarray framework. This contribution provides an overview of this work including the comparison of trigger and readout performance on test-bench data and trigger and image parameterization performance during on-sky measurements

    Sensitivity of CTA to gamma-ray emission from the Perseus galaxy cluster

    No full text
    In these proceedings we summarize the current status of the study of the sensitivity of the Cherenkov Telescope Array (CTA) to detect diffuse gamma-ray emission from the Perseus galaxy cluster. Gamma-ray emission is expected in galaxy clusters both from interactions of cosmic rays (CR) with the intra-cluster medium, or as a product of annihilation or decay of dark matter (DM) particles in case they are weakly interactive massive particles (WIMPs). The observation of Perseus constitutes one of the Key Science Projects to be carried out by the CTA Consortium. In this contribution, we focus on the DM-induced component of the flux. Our DM modelling includes the substructures we expect in the main halo which will boost the annihilation signal significantly. We adopt an ON/OFF observation strategy and simulate the expected gamma-ray signals. Finally we compute the expected CTA sensitivity using a likelihood maximization analysis including the most recent CTA instrument response functions. In absence of signal, we show that CTA will allow us to provide stringent and competitive constraints on TeV DM, especially for the case of DM decay

    The Cherenkov Telescope Array: layout, design and performance

    No full text
    The Cherenkov Telescope Array (CTA) will be the next generation very-high-energy gamma-ray observatory. CTA is expected to provide substantial improvement in accuracy and sensitivity with respect to existing instruments thanks to a tenfold increase in the number of telescopes and their state-of-the-art design. Detailed Monte Carlo simulations are used to further optimise the number of telescopes and the array layout, and to estimate the observatory performance using updated models of the selected telescope designs. These studies are presented in this contribution for the two CTA stations located on the island of La Palma (Spain) and near Paranal (Chile) and for different operation and observation conditions

    Sensitivity of the Cherenkov Telescope Array to emission from the gamma-ray counterparts of neutrino events

    No full text
    We investigate the possibility of detection of the VHE gamma-ray counterparts to the neutrino astrophysical sources within the Neutrino Target of Opportunity (NToO) program of CTA using the populations simulated by the FIRESONG software to resemble the diffuse astrophysical neutrino flux measured by IceCube. We derive the detection probability for different zenith angles and geomagnetic field configurations. The difference in detectability of sources between CTA-North and CTA-South for the average geomagnetic field is not substantial. We investigate the effect of a higher night-sky background and the preliminary CTA Alpha layout on the detection probability

    Southern African Large Telescope Spectroscopy of BL Lacs for the CTA project

    No full text
    In the last two decades, very-high-energy gamma-ray astronomy has reached maturity: over 200 sources have been detected, both Galactic and extragalactic, by ground-based experiments. At present, Active Galactic Nuclei (AGN) make up about 40% of the more than 200 sources detected at very high energies with ground-based telescopes, the majority of which are blazars, i.e. their jets are closely aligned with the line of sight to Earth and three quarters of which are classified as high-frequency peaked BL Lac objects. One challenge to studies of the cosmological evolution of BL Lacs is the difficulty of obtaining redshifts from their nearly featureless, continuum-dominated spectra. It is expected that a significant fraction of the AGN to be detected with the future Cherenkov Telescope Array (CTA) observatory will have no spectroscopic redshifts, compromising the reliability of BL Lac population studies, particularly of their cosmic evolution. We started an effort in 2019 to measure the redshifts of a large fraction of the AGN that are likely to be detected with CTA, using the Southern African Large Telescope (SALT). In this contribution, we present two results from an on-going SALT program focused on the determination of BL Lac object redshifts that will be relevant for the CTA observatory

    Prototype Open Event Reconstruction Pipeline for the Cherenkov Telescope Array

    No full text
    The Cherenkov Telescope Array (CTA) is the next-generation gamma-ray observatory currently under construction. It will improve over the current generation of imaging atmospheric Cherenkov telescopes (IACTs) by a factor of five to ten in sensitivity and it will be able to observe the whole sky from a combination of two sites: a northern site in La Palma, Spain, and a southern one in Paranal, Chile. CTA will also be the first open gamma-ray observatory. Accordingly, the data analysis pipeline is developed as open-source software. The event reconstruction pipeline accepts raw data of the telescopes and processes it to produce suitable input for the higher-level science tools. Its primary tasks include reconstructing the physical properties of each recorded shower and providing the corresponding instrument response functions. ctapipe is a framework providing algorithms and tools to facilitate raw data calibration, image extraction, image parameterization and event reconstruction. Its main focus is currently the analysis of simulated data but it has also been successfully applied for the analysis of data obtained with the first CTA prototype telescopes, such as the Large-Sized Telescope 1 (LST-1). pyirf is a library to calculate IACT instrument response functions, needed to obtain physics results like spectra and light curves, from the reconstructed event lists. Building on these two, protopipe is a prototype for the event reconstruction pipeline for CTA. Recent developments in these software packages will be presented
    corecore