Cherenkov-Plenoscope
Abstract
Telescopes -- far seeing -- have since centuries revealed insights to objects at cosmic distances. Adopted for gamma-ray-astronomy, ground based Cherenkov-telescopes image the faint Cherenkov-light of air-showers induced by cosmic gamma-rays rushing into earth's atmosphere. In the race for the lowest possible energy-threshold for cosmic gamma-rays, these Cherenkov-telescopes have become bigger, and now reached their physical limits. The required structural rigidity for image-quality constrains a cost-effective construction of telescopes with apertures beyond 30 meter in diameter. Moreover, as the aperture increases, the narrower depth-of-field irrecoverably blurs the images what prevents the reconstruction of the cosmic particle's properties. To overcome these limits, we propose plenoptic-perception with light-fields. Our proposed 71 meter Cherenkov-plenoscope requires much less structural rigidity and turns a narrow depth-of-field into three-dimensional reconstruction-power. With an energy-threshold for gamma-rays of one Giga electron Volt, 20 times lower than what is foreseen for the future planned Cherenkov-Telescope-Array (CTA), the Cherenkov-plenoscope could become the portal to enter the sub second time-scale of the highly variable gamma-ray-sky. Also, this doctoral-thesis contains a second part on the prospects of single-photon-perception in Cherenkov-astronomy.
Keywords
Cite
@article{arxiv.1904.13368,
title = {Cherenkov-Plenoscope},
author = {Sebastian Achim Mueller},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1904.13368},
year = {2019}
}
Comments
A ground-based approach in one Giga electron Volt, one second time-to-detection gamma-ray-astronomy. Doctoral-thesis at ETH-Zurich's Institute for Particle Physics and Astrophysics (1). In collaboration with ETH-Zurich's Department of Civil, Environmental and Geomatic Engineering (2). We thankfully acknowledge the support provided by: Max Ludwig Ahnen (1), Dominik Neise (1), Axel Arbet-Engels (1), Spyridon Daglas (2), Adrian Egger (2), Eleni Chatzi (2), Felicitas Pauss (1), and Adrian Biland (1). For high resolution figures, follow the DOI to ETH-Zurich-library: https://doi.org/10.3929/ethz-b-000337911