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Free keywords:
Astrophysics, High Energy Astrophysical Phenomena, astro-ph.HE, Astrophysics, Instrumentation and Methods for Astrophysics, astro-ph.IM,High Energy Physics - Experiment, hep-ex, Physics, Instrumentation and Detectors, physics.ins-det
MPINP:
HAWC - Abteilung Hinton
Abstract:
The High Altitude Water Cherenkov (HAWC) gamma-ray observatory observes
atmospheric showers produced by incident gamma rays and cosmic rays with energy
from 300 GeV to more than 100 TeV. A crucial phase in analyzing gamma-ray
sources using ground-based gamma-ray detectors like HAWC is to identify the
showers produced by gamma rays or hadrons. The HAWC observatory records roughly
25,000 events per second, with hadrons representing the vast majority
($>99.9\%$) of these events. The standard gamma/hadron separation technique in
HAWC uses a simple rectangular cut involving only two parameters. This work
describes the implementation of more sophisticated gamma/hadron separation
techniques, via machine learning methods (boosted decision trees and neural
networks), and summarizes the resulting improvements in gamma/hadron separation
obtained in HAWC.
