Outreach

HAWC Collaboration Meeting

From May 13 to 16, the scientists of the international collaboration of HAWC, a gamma ray observatory located in this state, met in the city of Puebla.

This was the first face-to-face meeting of the collaboration since 2019. The work program consisted of short talks on the scientific results that have been obtained with HAWC, and on technical aspects of the experiment.

Dr. Alberto Carramiñana Alonso, a researcher at the INAOE Astrophysics Coordination and spokesperson for the observatory on the Mexican side, recalls that all the members of the HAWC collaboration had been meeting twice a year, even more, since its formation in 2007, “and this is the first face-to-face meeting after the pandemic. The last meeting we all had together was in 2019. The one in 2020 that was going to be at Stanford was cancelled. We have been working by videoconference and in hybrid mode, and now we are finally together. 65 members of the collaboration came to Puebla in this opportunity, and we were already able to discuss issues personally, it is much more interactive and really productive”.

He adds that studies based on data obtained by the HAWC observatory were presented at the meeting: “They are preliminary studies, the results that we eventually want to lead to publications are just coming out. Many of the discussions we have are very technical, from people who know the instrument well, but in the end that's how scientific work is."

For his part, Dr. Daniel Rosa González, INAOE researcher and HAWC representative at INAOE, adds that at the meeting there were talks on galactic and extragalactic objects as well as talks involving the search for dark matter particles or more exotic as axions.

HAWC

The High Altitude Water Cherenkov Observatory, or HAWC, is a laboratory designed to detect gamma rays and cosmic rays at TeV energies with an aperture covering more than 15% of the sky. With its wide field of view, the observatory is exposed to two-thirds of the sky during each 24-hour cycle.

HAWC is built on one of the slopes of the Sierra Negra volcano, near Puebla, Mexico. It is located at an altitude of approximately 4100 meters above sea level. HAWC is used to perform a general survey of the sky at energies between 100 GeV and 100 TeV (tera-electron-volts).

For more information see https://www.hawc-observatory.org/