Speaker
Description
The observation of cosmic gamma rays is crucial for understanding high-energy astrophysical phenomena and the mechanism of cosmic-ray acceleration. We have been running the GRAINE project, a cosmic gamma-ray observation project in an energy range of 10MeV – 100GeV, using balloon-borne telescope equipped with nuclear emulsion, characterized with a high-angular resolution and polarization sensitivity, with a large aperture area (10 m2). The observation in the immediate vicinity of the Galactic center with the high angular resolution may bring new insights into the dark matter density profile among other exciting discoveries. So far, we have repeated balloon experiments for the demonstration. Then, the brightest known gamma- ray source, the Vela pulsar, was clearly detected in 2018 balloon experiment, and the emulsion gamma-ray telescope with the highest angular resolution in this energy region was established in sub-GeV energy region. The latest balloon experiment is GRAINE2023, performed in Australia with an aperture area of 2.5 m2, which is the first step of scientific observation, and we will start to observe not only the pulsar but also the Galactic center region. We will show the overview of GRAINE2023 and the performance evaluation of the flight data.
