The High Altitude Water Cherenkov Observatory, HAWC, is a new instrument designed to map the sky in the highest-energy gamma rays ever detected.
We built the detector at a 13,000-ft high-altitude site in Mexico between two mountains, Sierra Negra and Pico de Orizaba, the tallest mountain in Mexico.
The detector consists of a grid of water tanks, instrumented with sensitive photomultiplier tubes (PMTs), covering an area roughly the size of two football fields.
High-energy gamma rays that hit the atmosphere of the Earth do not make it to the ground. They interact in the upper atmosphere making a particle cascade (called an 'extensive air shower') that propagates to the ground at nearly the speed of light. The HAWC instrument can detect these showers and determine the direction of the gamma ray that created them.
With HAWC, we can observe air showers day or night, rain or shine. We continuously monitor the overhead sky looking for sudden bursts of gamma rays and building up our high-energy map of the sky.
HAWC science is multi-faceted. We study objects outside our own galaxy, gamma-ray bursts and active galaxies, as well as objects within our own galaxy, supernova remnants and pulsar wind nebulae. We are also searching for new physics: dark matter, primordial black holes and evidence of Lorentz invariance violation.
I am particularly interested in the highest-energy photons from HAWC and using these photons to unveil the origin of the IceCube astrophysical neutrinos. If the neutrinos are produced "close enough" to Earth, we expect a strong gamma-ray signal and I am looking for this gamma-ray signal.
Drone Footage at the HAWC Site (with some really interesting music in the background)
The HAWC Has Landed Space.com article on HAWC
Houston Area Women's Center Which has nothing to do with gamma-ray astrophysics. But, over the years, we bumped them from the top spot in google for a search of the term 'hawc' and I want to give them a shoutout to compensate