SEARCH FOR GAMMA-RAY COUNTERPARTS OF GRAVITATIONAL WAVE EVENTS AND OTHER TRANSIENT SIGNALS WITH HAWC

Simple item page
dc.contributor.advisorGoodman, Jordan Aen_US
dc.contributor.authorMartinez Castellanos, Israelen_US
dc.contributor.departmentPhysicsen_US
dc.contributor.publisherDigital Repository at the University of Marylanden_US
dc.contributor.publisherUniversity of Maryland (College Park, Md.)en_US
dc.date.accessioned2019-09-27T05:40:07Z
dc.date.available2019-09-27T05:40:07Z
dc.date.issued2019en_US
dc.description.abstractIn recent years we have seen major advances in multi-messenger astronomy. A milestone was achieved by identifying the electromagnetic counterpart of the gravitational wave event GW170817 detected by LIGO and Virgo. Similar efforts led to a set of neutrinos detected by IceCube to be associated with the blazar TXS 0506+056. Both demonstrate the potential of using multiple types of probes to study an astrophysical source. The High-Altitude Water Cherenkov Observatory (HAWC), located in the state of Puebla, Mexico, is a wide field instrument (~2 sr) sensitive to very-high-energy gamma rays (~0.1-100 TeV) which can operate with a large duty cycle (>95%). These characteristics make it well suited to look for transient events correlated with other astronomical messengers. In this work we present a maximum likelihood analysis framework developed to search and analyze signals in HAWC data of arbitrary timescales. We apply this method to search for very-high-energy gamma-ray counterparts of gravitational waves in short timescales (0.3-1000 s). We show that we would be able to either detect or meaningfully constrain the very-high-energy component of a gamma-ray burst within the binary neutron star merger horizon of current gravitational wave detectors if it occurs in our field of view. We did not find evidence for emission for any of the events analyzed. The source location of GW170817 was not observable by HAWC at the time of the merger. We also set flux upper bounds for TXS 0506+056 during the periods when the neutrino flares were identified. For the flare between September 2014 and March 2015 these are the only available limits at very high energy, and are consistent with the low state in high-energy gamma rays reported by the Fermi-LAT Collaboration.en_US
dc.identifierhttps://doi.org/10.13016/bcjz-xvre
dc.identifier.urihttp://hdl.handle.net/1903/25037
dc.language.isoenen_US
dc.subject.pqcontrolledAstrophysicsen_US
dc.subject.pquncontrolledgamma raysen_US
dc.subject.pquncontrolledgravitational wavesen_US
dc.subject.pquncontrolledHAWCen_US
dc.subject.pquncontrolledmulti-messengeren_US
dc.subject.pquncontrolledneutrinosen_US
dc.titleSEARCH FOR GAMMA-RAY COUNTERPARTS OF GRAVITATIONAL WAVE EVENTS AND OTHER TRANSIENT SIGNALS WITH HAWCen_US
dc.typeDissertationen_US

Files

Original bundle
Now showing 1 - 1 of 1
Thumbnail Image
Name:
MartinezCastellanos_umd_0117E_20255.pdf
Size:
27.52 MB
Format:
Adobe Portable Document Format
Download

Collections

UMD Theses and Dissertations
Physics Theses and Dissertations