0000000000261984
AUTHOR
Zhengguo Cao
Search for Gamma-Ray Emission from the Sun during Solar Minimum with the ARGO-YBJ Experiment
The hadronic interaction of cosmic rays with solar atmosphere can produce high energy gamma-rays. The gamma-ray luminosity is correlated both with the flux of primary cosmic rays and the intensity of the solar magnetic field. The gamma-rays below 200 GeV have been observed by Fermi without any evident energy cutoff. The bright gamma-ray flux above 100 GeV has been detected only during solar minimum. The only available data in the TeV range come from the HAWC observations, however, outside the solar minimum. The ARGO-YBJ data set has been used to search for sub-TeV/TeV gamma-rays from the Sun during the solar minimum from 2008 to 2010, the same time period covered by the Fermi data. A suitab…
Software Timing Calibration of the ARGO-YBJ Detector
The ARGO-YBJ experiment is mainly devoted to search for astronomical gamma sources. The arrival direction of air showers is reconstructed thanks to the times measured by the pixels of the detector. Therefore, the timing calibration of the detector pixels is crucial in order to get the best angular resolution and pointing accuracy. Because of the large number of pixels a hardware timing calibration is practically impossible. Therefore an off-line software calibration has been adopted. Here, the details of the procedure and the results are presented. (C) 2008 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.
Mean Interplanetary Magnetic Field Measurement Using the ARGO-YBJ Experiment
The sun blocks cosmic ray particles from outside the solar system, forming a detectable shadow in the sky map of cosmic rays detected by the ARGO-YBJ experiment in Tibet. Because the cosmic ray particles are positive charged, the magnetic field between the sun and the earth deflects them from straight trajectories and results in a shift of the shadow from the true location of the sun. Here we show that the shift measures the intensity of the field which is transported by the solar wind from the sun to the earth.
Observation of TeV gamma rays from the Cygnus region with the ARGO-YBJ experiment
We report the observation of TeV gamma-rays from the Cygnus region using the ARGO-YBJ data collected from 2007 November to 2011 August. Several TeV sources are located in this region including the two bright extended MGRO J2019+37 and MGRO J2031+41. According to the Milagro data set, at 20 TeV MGRO J2019+37 is the most significant source apart from the Crab Nebula. No signal from MGRO J2019+37 is detected by the ARGO-YBJ experiment, and the derived flux upper limits at 90% confidence level for all the events above 600 GeV with medium energy of 3 TeV are lower than the Milagro flux, implying that the source might be variable and hard to be identified as a pulsar wind nebula. The only statist…
Galactic Cosmic-Ray Anisotropy in the Northern hemisphere from the ARGO-YBJ Experiment during 2008-2012
This paper reports on the observation of the sidereal large-scale anisotropy of cosmic rays using data collected by the ARGO-YBJ experiment over 5 years (2008-2012). This analysis extends previous work limited to the period from 2008 January to 2009 December, near the minimum of solar activity between cycles 23 and 24. With the new data sample, the period of solar cycle 24 from near minimum to maximum is investigated. A new method is used to improve the energy reconstruction, allowing us to cover a much wider energy range, from 4 to 520 TeV. Below 100 TeV, the anisotropy is dominated by two wide regions, the so-called “tail-in” and “loss-cone” features. At higher energies, a dramatic change…
ARGO-YBJ constraints on very high energy emission from GRBs
The ARGO-YBJ (Astrophysical Radiation Ground-based Observatory at YangBaJing) experiment is designed for very high energy $\gamma$-astronomy and cosmic ray researches. Due to the full coverage of a large area ($5600 m^2$) with resistive plate chambers at a very high altitude (4300 m a.s.l.), the ARGO-YBJ detector is used to search for transient phenomena, such as Gamma-ray bursts (GRBs). Because the ARGO-YBJ detector has a large field of view ($\sim$2 sr) and is operated with a high duty cycle ($>$90%), it is well suited for GRB surveying and can be operated in searches for high energy GRBs following alarms set by satellite-borne observations at lower energies. In this paper, the sensitivit…
Temperature effect on RPC performance in the ARGO-YBJ experiment
The ARGO-YBJ experiment has been taking data for nearly 2 years. In order to monitor continuously the performance of the Resistive Plate Chamber detectors and to study the daily temperature effects on the detector performance, a cosmic ray muon telescope was setup near the carpet detector array in the ARGO-YBJ laboratory. Based on the measurements performed using this telescope, it is found that, at the actual operating voltage of 7.2kV, the temperature effect on the RPC time resolution is about 0.04ns/degrees C and on the particle detection efficiency is about 0.03%/degrees C. Based on these figures we conclude that the environmental effects do not affect substantially the angular resoluti…
Layout and performance of RPC used in the Argo-YBJ experiment
The layout of the RPCs, used in the Argo-YBJ experiment to image with a high space-time granularity the atmospheric shower, is described in this paper. The detector has been assembled to provide both digital and analog informations in order to cover a wide particle density range with a time accuracy of 1 ns. The experimental results obtained operating the chambers in streamer mode at sea level with a standard gas mixture are presented. (c) 2006 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.