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Abstract:
Identification of Cherenkov light generated by muons has been suggested as a promising way to dramatically improve the background rejection power of Imaging Atmo- spheric Cherenkov Telescope (IACT) arrays at high ener- gies. However, muon identification remains a challenging task, for which efficient algorithms are still being developed. We present an approach in which, rather than identifying Cherenkov light from muons, we simply consider the pres- ence of Cherenkov light other than the main shower image in IACTs with large mirror area. We show that in the case of the H.E.S.S. array of five telescopes this approach results in background rejection improvements at all energies above 1 TeV. In particular, the rejection power can be improved by a factor ∼ 3–4 at energies above 20 TeV while keeping ∼ 90% of the original gamma-ray efficiency.
