Particle Astrophysics with Gamma-Ray Telescopes

This book summarizes the history, theory, instruments, and current results in the field of particle astrophysics with cosmic gamma rays, from the experimentalist’s perspective. This book is meant to be a practical guide for students beginning gamma-ray astrophysics research, covering topics not taught in traditional physics classes!

Gamma-ray astrophysics combines the exciting fields of Particle Physics and Astronomy. We get to study particle interactions in space! Using the Universe as our laboratory, we are able to study fundamental physics in extreme environments unavailable in labs on Earth. This book summarizes the history, theory, instruments, and current results in the field of particle astrophysics with cosmic gamma rays. We frame things from the experimentalist’s perspective. This book is meant to be a practical guide for students just beginning gamma-ray astrophysics research. It covers topics they don’t teach you in your traditional physics classes!We start in the 1800s with Lord Kelvin’s “Thunderstorm” experiment, before going through the design and results of early balloon and satellite experiments, summarizing the particle physics theories of astrophysical phenomena like Pulsars and Dark Matter, describing current gamma-ray observatories, and finally discussing modern exciting results and open questions in the field. We also focus on how the instruments are built and what features determine the performance of each. Come learn about observatories made out of water and satellites that run on the power of a toaster. With the knowledge in this book, you should be able to read detailed research papers and have a better understanding of their content. Whilst not intended for a lay person audience, the content is accessible to non-specialist scientists and undergraduate physics students. This eBook was published Open Access with funding support from the Sponsoring Consortium for Open Access Publishing in Particle Physics (SCOAP3). The Open Access version of this book, available at http://www.taylorfrancis.com has been made available under a Creative Commons [Attribution-Non Commercial (CC BY-NC)] 4.0 license. Key features:· The first introductory book on wide field of view TeV gamma-ray observatories· Describes particle astrophysics concepts and research results for a non-expert· Accompanied by the open access code used to analyze HAWC data