Observation of TeV gamma ray extended sources with ARGO-YBJ

Abstract More than 80% of TeV galactic gamma ray sources are spatially extended and many of them are still unidentified. The extended emission could be the result of cosmic ray interactions with the ambient medium which provides the target to produce TeV gamma rays. The sensitivity of ground based gamma ray detectors decreases for extended sources; shower detectors, due to their large field of view, are less affected with respect to Cherenkov telescopes. The ARGO-YBJ experiment (Yangbajing Cosmic Ray Laboratory, Tibet, China, 4300 m of altitude) is an air shower detector devoted to gamma ray astronomy at energies above a few hundred GeV, with an integrated sensitivity ranging from 0.24 to ~ 1 Crab units, depending on the source declination. In this paper the observation of galactic extended sources with ARGO-YBJ during 5 years is reviewed

Expected sensitivity of ARGO-YBJ to detect point gamma-ray sources

ARGO-YBJ is a full coverage air shower detector currently under construction at the Yangbajing Laboratory (4300 m a.s.l., Tibet, China). First data obtained with a subset of the apparatus will be available in summer 2003 while the full detector operation is expected in 2005. One of the main aims of ARGO-YBJ is the observation of gamma-ray sources, at an energy threshold of a few hundreds GeV. In this paper we present the expected sensitivity to detect point gamma ray sources, with particular attention to the Crab Nebula. According to our simulations a Crab-like signal could be detected in one year of operation with a statistical significance of 10 standard deviations, without any gamma/hadron discrimination.Comment: 4 pages, 2 Postscript figure