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Description
The High Altitude Water Cherenkov (HAWC) observatory is a wide-field gamma-ray detector located at an altitude of 4100 m in Mexico, sensitive to gamma rays in the energy range from 300 GeV to several hundred TeV. HAWC consists of 300 water Cherenkov detectors (WCDs) in the main array and 345 smaller WCDs in the surrounding outrigger array. The current air shower reconstruction uses only the main array, while including data from the outrigger array can improve reconstruction performance at the highest energies.
In this work, we evaluate the impact of the outrigger array on air shower reconstruction using Geant4-based detector simulations and the HAWC reconstruction algorithm. We compare the instrument response functions (IRFs) obtained with and without outrigger signals, including angular resolution, core resolution, energy resolution, effective area, gamma/hadron separation, and expected sensitivity to gamma-ray sources.
