Background rejection using image residuals from large telescopes in imaging atmospheric Cherenkov telescope arrays by Laura Olivera-Nieto et al. on Thursday 24 November

Identification of Cherenkov light generated by muons has been suggested as a

promising way to dramatically improve the background rejection power of Imaging

Atmospheric Cherenkov Telescope (IACT) arrays at high energies. However, muon

identification remains a challenging task, for which efficient algorithms are

still being developed. We present an approach in which, rather than identifying

Cherenkov light from muons, we simply consider the presence of Cherenkov light

other than the main shower image in IACTs with large mirror area. We show that

in the case of the H.E.S.S. array of five telescopes this approach results in

background rejection improvements at all energies above 1 TeV. In particular,

the rejection power can be improved by a factor $\sim3-4$ at energies above 20

TeV while keeping $\sim90\%$ of the original gamma-ray efficiency.

arXiv: http://arxiv.org/abs/http://arxiv.org/abs/2211.13167v1