Inauguration of the High Altitude Water Cherekov Observatory

Professor Miguel Mostafá proudly showing off the PMT (deploying and) mounting mechanisms designed and built by his research group.

Construction of the High Altitude Water Cherekov Observatory (HAWC) Observatory began four years ago. On 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 U.S. National Science Foundation (NSF), and the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) in a ceremony at the detector site in Sierra Negra, Mexico.

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. Professor Peter Mészáros from Penn State gave a lecture on the state-of-the-art in the study of gamma-ray bursts.

Professor Miguel Mostafá was the task leader responsible for the deployment of the 300 water Cherenkov detector. His research group designed and built 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.

For more information please visit the High Altitude Water Cherekov site.

(courtesy of the Department of Physics website)