Status and updates from the High Altitude Water Cherenkov (HAWC) Observatory

Abstract

The High Altitude Water Cherenkov Observatory (HAWC) is currently being deployed on the slopes of Volcan Sierra Negra, Puebla, Mexico. The HAWC observatory will consist of 300 Water Cherenkov Detectors totaling approximately 22,000 m2 of instrumented area. The water Cherenkov technique allows HAWC to have a nearly 100% duty cycle and large field of view, making the HAWC observatory an ideal instrument for the study of transient phenomena. With its large effective area, excellent angular and energy resolutions, and efficient gamma-hadron separation, HAWC will survey the TeV gamma ray sky, measure spectra of galactic sources from 1 TeV to beyond 100 TeV, and map galactic diffuse gamma ray emission. The science goals and performance of the HAWC observatory as well as how it will complement contemporaneous space and ground-based detectors will be presented.