The drive system of the Major Atmospheric Gamma-ray Imaging Cherenkov Telescope

The MAGIC telescope is an imaging atmospheric Cherenkov telescope, designed to observe very high energy gamma-rays while achieving a low energy threshold. One of the key science goals is fast follow-up of the enigmatic and short lived gamma-ray bursts. The drive system for the telescope has to meet two basic demands: (1) During normal observations, the 72-ton telescope has to be positioned accurately, and has to track a given sky position with high precision at a typical rotational speed in the order of one revolution per day. (2) For successfully observing GRB prompt emission and afterglows, it has to be powerful enough to position to an arbitrary point on the sky within a few ten seconds and commence normal tracking immediately thereafter. To meet these requirements, the implementation and realization of the drive system relies strongly on standard industry components to ensure robustness and reliability. In this paper, we describe the mechanical setup, the drive control and the calibration of the pointing, as well as present measurements of the accuracy of the system. We show that the drive system is mechanically able to operate the motors with an accuracy even better than the feedback values from the axes. In the context of future projects, envisaging telescope arrays comprising about 100 individual instruments, the robustness and scalability of the concept is emphasized.Comment: 15 pages, 12 (10) figures, submitted to Astroparticle Physics, a high resolution version of the paper (particularly fig. 1) is available at http://publications.mppmu.mpg.de/2008/MPP-2008-101/FullText.pd

The H 1 liquid argon calorimeter system

The liquid argon calorimeter of the H 1 detector presently taking data at the HERA ep collider at DESY, Hamburg, is described. The main physics requirements and the most salient design features relevant to this calorimeter are given. The aim to have smooth and hermetic calorimetric coverage over the polar angular range 4° ≤ θ ≤ 154° is achieved by a single liquid argon cryostat containing calorimeter stacks structured in wheels and octants for easy handling. The absorber materials used are lead in the electromagnetic part and stainless steel in the hadronic part. The read-out system is pipelined to reduce the dead time induced by the high trigger rate expected at the HERA collider where consecutive bunches are separated in time by 96 ns. The main elements of the calorimeter, such as the cryostat, with its associated cryogenics, the stack modules, the read-out, calibration and trigger electronics as well as the data acquisition system are described. Performance results from data taken in calibration runs with full size H 1 calorimeter stacks at a CERN test beam, as well as results from data collected with the complete H 1 detector using cosmic rays during the initial phase of ep operations are presented. The observed energy resolutions and linearities are well in agreement with the requirements