Gamma/hadron discrimination in ground-based gamma-ray observatories at the sub-TeV energy range is challenging as traditional muon-based methods become less effective at lower energies. This work explores a novel gamma/hadron discrimination method for Extensive Air Shower arrays that analyzes the shower signal footprint patterns using a state-of-the-art pre-trained Vision Transformer (ViT). The resilience of the method to background noise, such as atmospheric muons and low-energy proton showers, along with its adaptability to different zenith angles and array configurations, demonstrates its potential for application in current and future ground-based gamma-ray observatories.
@article{arxiv.2409.11093,
title = {Discriminating sub-TeV gamma and hadron-induced showers through their footprints},
author = {R. Conceição and B. S. González and A. Guillén and M. Pimenta and B. Tomé},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2409.11093},
year = {2025}
}