R&D Studies for Very High Energy Gamma-Ray Astrophysics at Energies Greater than 10 TeV

摘要

In spite of more than 100 discoveries of TeV gamma-ray sources by the current imaging atmospheric Cherenkov telescope (IACT) arrays, Galactic cosmic ray accelerators up to the knee energies ( PeV) still remain unclear. PeV Explorer (or PeX) is a future project of a relatively small IACT array, optimized to detect gamma rays of energies greater than 10 TeV and aiming to explore Galactic accelerators up to PeV energies. We present the status of our hardware R & D studies for this project and some extension plans.