The background from single electromagnetic subcascades for a stereo system of air Cherenkov telescopes

Abstract

The MAGIC experiment, a very large imaging air Cherenkov telescope (IACT) with sensitivity to low-energy (E < 100 GeV) VHE gamma rays, has been operated since 2004. It has been found that the γ/hadron separation in IACTs becomes much more difficult below 100 GeV (Albert J et al 2008 Astrophys. J. 674 1037). A system of two large telescopes may eventually be triggered by hadronic events containing Cherenkov light from only one electromagnetic subcascade or two γ subcascades, which are products of the single π0 decay. This is a possible reason for the deterioration of the experiment's sensitivity below 100 GeV. In this paper, a system of two MAGIC telescopes working in a stereoscopic mode is studied using Monte Carlo simulations. The detected images have similar shapes to that of primary γ-rays, and they have small sizes (mainly below 400 photoelectrons (pe)) which correspond to an energy of primary γ-rays below 100 GeV. The background from single or two electromagnetic subcascades is concentrated at energies below 200 GeV. Finally, the number of background events is compared to the number of VHE γ-ray excess events from the Crab Nebula. The investigated background survives simple cuts for sizes below 250 pe, and thus the experiment's sensitivity deteriorates at lower energies.