Date of Award

2022

Document Type

Open Access Master's Report

Degree Name

Master of Science in Physics (MS)

Administrative Home Department

Department of Physics

Advisor 1

Petra Huentemeyer

Committee Member 1

David Nitz

Committee Member 2

Brian Fick

Committee Member 3

Ravindra Pandey

Abstract

The Southern Wide-field Gamma-ray Observatory (SWGO), is a next-generation
gamma-ray observatory to be constructed in the Southern Hemisphere that will com-
plement current and future instruments by providing a wide-field coverage of a large
portion of the southern sky and a better sensitivity to the 100 GeVs to few PeVs
photon band to understand extreme astrophysical phenomena throughout the uni-
verse. Air shower events initiated by gamma rays will be recorded by the detector
and reconstructed to extract shower properties. The challenge for air-shower arrays
in the observation of gamma-ray sources is the large background of hadronic cos-
mic rays. Thus, the identification and separation of this background is critical. In
this report, I present a performance study of gamma-hadron separation parameters
for the SWGO observatory using simulation data a study with a specific parameters
that measures the smoothness of the footprint in the detector array was conducted
and results achieved with a SWGO reference configuration were compared to results
confirmed with the High-Altitude Water Cherenkov(HAWC) Observatory.

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