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Abstract

The High Altitude Water Cherenkov (HAWC) observatory is a very high energy
gamma-ray detector located in Mexico. In late 2018, the HAWC collaboration
completed a major upgrade consisting of the addition of a sparse outrigger
array of 345 small water Cherenkov detectors (WCDs) surrounding the 300 WCDs of
the main array and extending the instrumented area by a factor of 4. It
provides an improved reconstruction of the showers whose core and footprint are
not well contained in the array and increases the effective area in the range
of a few TeV to beyond 100 TeV. This improvement in sensitivity will help to
have a better understanding of the Galactic sources that accelerate particles
up to the knee of the cosmic ray spectrum. In this contribution, we will show
the current status, the performance, and the first results from the HAWC
outrigger array.