VERY HIGH ENERGY PARTICLE ASTRONOMY WITH ALL-SKY SURVER HIGH RESOLUTION AIR-SHOWER DETECTOR
Abstract
The Ashra detector consists of 3 observational stations installed on the grid of 30-40km distance on the mountains on the Hawaii Big Island, which ensures a large target mass for neutrinos and a large effective aperture for UHECR. An observational station is composed of 12 wide-angle high-precision telescopes, which can completely cover allsky view. In realizing the telescope design, we newly apply the following techniques matured in the other fields: 1) Baker-Nunn optics optimized to keep better than 1 arcmin. resolution in 50° field of view, 2) Electro-static lens image-intensifier tube (IIT) with the resolution matched with that of the above optics, 3) Gated IIT with a fast image shutter, and 4) CMOS image sensor which reads triggered images out of the above IIT.
These novel techniques allow us an excellent opportunity for simultaneous observation of air fluorescence and Cerenkov lights with 1 arcmin. resolution in entirely all sky. This will open an interesting field, "Observational Particle Astronomy" by continuously observing TeV gamma-rays, VHE-neutrinos, Knee-CR, and EHECR with the energies from TeV to ZeV in all sky.
