Construction of the HAWC Observatory began four years ago. Today (March 20, 2015), the detector was formally inaugurated by members of the collaboration, representatives from collaborating institutions and the particle astrophysics community, and representatives from CONACyT, the US National Science Foundation (NSF), and the US Department of Energy (DOE) in a ceremony at the detector site at Sierra Negra.
The ceremony capped a two-day event celebrating the completion of HAWC. On Thursday March 19, over 250 people participated in an inaugural symposium surveying the state of high energy particle astrophysics at the Complejo Cultural Universitario of BUAP in Puebla. The speakers included guests from most of the major gamma-ray, cosmic-ray, and neutrino observatories in operation around the world, as well as leading theorists in the field. Prof. Peter Mészáros from Penn State gave a lecture on the state-of-the-art in the study of gamma-ray bursts.
On the day of the inauguration, HAWC collaborators and invited guests traveled up the mountain to tour the HAWC site and view work by school children and artists from the town of Texmalaquilla. At noon, Enrique Cabrero, director of CONACyT, and France Córdova, director of NSF, officially inaugurated the detector by starting a new data acquisition run.
Prof. Miguel Mostafá was the task leader responsible for the deployment of the 300 water Cherenkov detector. His research group designed and build the 300 plastic bladders that hold the 200,000 liters of ultra-pure water inside each detector. His group also designed a dedicated system for deploying the photo-multiplier tubes in their precise location inside the detectors. Bladders were the only major detector component that was constructed by the collaboration. Commercial bladders did not satisfy the strict requirements of the scientific instrument. Namely, despite being 5 m tall and 7.5 m in diameter, bladders must be absolutely light-tight.
Now, with data from the full Observatory, the Penn State group is concentrating its efforts in new TeV sources, detection of gamma rays from GRBs above 100 GeV, extragalactic gamma ray diffuse emission, and dark matter emission from the Galactic center!
Stay tuned for the discoveries coming from HAWC!!!