Observations of the active galactic nucleus Markarian 421 with the first two VERITAS Cerenkov telescopes

Details Observations of the active galactic nucleus Markarian 421 with the first two VERITAS Cerenkov telescopes Observations of the active galactic nucleus Markarian 421 with the first two VERITAS Cerenkov telescopes

Aug 2007

adsabs.harvard.edu/cgi-bin/nph-data_query?bibcode=2007phdt........16h&link_type=abstract

Proquest Dissertations And Theses 2007. Section 0252, Part 0606 155 pages; [Ph.D. dissertation].United States -- Missouri: Wash

Computer Science

Performance

Markarian 421, Veritas, Active Galactic Nuclei, Blazars

Scientific paper

This thesis describes two projects, the first of which is the analysis of data from the VERITAS (Very Energetic Radiation Imaging Telescope Array System) experiment. VERITAS, an array of ground-based g-ray telescopes in southern Arizona, USA, has been taking data in hardware stereo mode since March, 2006. The April-May 2006 dark run provided a large set of data from two telescopes on the known blazar Markarian (Mrk) 421. An initial analysis of the 14.3 hours of stereo data produced a light curve and confirmed a detection on the 39 sigma level with a g-ray rate of 2.91 ± 0.07 g min -1 , reduced from an inferred value of 8.83 ± 0.21g min -1 before analysis cuts. The analysis shows the two- telescope array's energy threshold to be 165 GeV before cuts and 220 GeV after cuts, with an angular resolution of 0.16 °. These data were also used to extract an energy spectrum for Mrk 421. This initial analysis allows a test of the performance of the two-telescope array and gives an idea of the data that will come from the full system. The remaining two VERITAS telescopes will be brought online by January, 2007. As a second project, computer simulations were used to model Synchrotron Self-Compton (SSC) emission from blazars that will be relevant for future multiwavelength campaigns. The Discrete Correlation Function (DCF) was used to calculate the source's magnetic field based on the time lag between emission in different X-ray energy bands. This method, used by different authors in the literature, was shown to overestimate the magnetic field by as much as a factor of six. Understanding the behavior of properties such as this will allow the breaking of model degeneracies and give insight into the physical processes involved in particle acceleration of blazars.

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