MAGIC (telescope)

Observations

MAGIC has found pulsed gamma-rays at energies higher than 25 GeV coming from the Crab Pulsar. The presence of such high energies indicates that the gamma-ray source is far out in the pulsar's magnetosphere, in contradiction with many models.

In 2006 MAGIC detected very high energy cosmic rays from the quasar 3C 279, which is 5 billion light years from Earth. This doubles the previous record distance from which very high energy cosmic rays have been detected. The signal indicated that the universe is more transparent than previously thought based on data from optical and infrared telescopes.

MAGIC did not observe cosmic rays resulting from dark matter decays in the dwarf galaxy Draco. This strengthens the known constraints on dark matter models.

A much more controversial observation is an energy dependence in the speed of light of cosmic rays coming from a short burst of the blazar Markarian 501 on July 9, 2005. Photons with energies between 1.2 and 10 TeV arrived 4 minutes after those in a band between 0.25 and 0.6 TeV. The average delay was 30 ±12 ms per GeV of energy of the photon. If the relation between the space velocity of a photon and its energy is linear, then this translates into the fractional difference in the speed of light being equal to minus the photon's energy divided by 2×10¹⁷ GeV. The researchers have suggested that the delay could be explained by the presence of quantum foam, the irregular structure of which might slow down photons by minuscule amounts only detectable at cosmic distances such as in the case of the blazar.

Technical specifications

Each telescope has the following specifications:

• A collecting area 236 m² consisting of 956 50 cm × 50 cm aluminium individual reflectors
• A lightweight carbon fibre frame
• A detector consisting of 396 separate hexagonal photomultiplier detectors in the center (diameter: 2.54 cm) surrounded by 180 larger photomultiplier detectors (diameter: 3.81 cm).
• Data are transferred in analogue form by fibre optic cables
• Signal digitization is done via an ADC (analog-to-digital converter) with a 2 GHz sampling rate
• Total weight of 40,000 kg
• Reaction time to move to any position of the sky less than 22 seconds

Each mirror of the reflector is a sandwich of an aluminum honeycomb, 5 mm plate of AlMgSi alloy, covered with a thin layer of quartz to protect the mirror surface from aging. The mirrors have spherical shape with a curvature corresponding to the position of the plate in the paraboloid reflector. The reflectivity of the mirrors is around 90%. The focal spot has a size of roughly half a pixel size (<0.05°).

Directing the telescope to different elevation angles causes the reflector to deviate from its ideal shape due to the gravity. To counteract this deformation, the telescope is equipped with an Active Mirror Control system. Four mirrors are mounted on each panel, which is equipped with actuators that can adjust its orientation in the frame.

The signal from the detector is transmitted over 162 m of optical fibers. The signal is digitized and stored in a 32 kB ring buffer. The readout of the ring buffer results in a dead time of 20 μs, which corresponds to about 2% dead time at the design trigger rate of 1 kHz. The readout is controlled by an FPGA (Xilinx) chip on a PCI (MicroEnable) card. The data is saved to a RAID0 disk system at a rate up to 20 MB/s, which results in up to 800 GB raw data per night.

Collaborating institutions

Physicists from over twenty institutions in Germany, Spain, Italy, Switzerland, Croatia, Finland, Poland, India, Bulgaria and Armenia collaborate in using MAGIC; the largest groups are at

• Institut de Física d'Altes Energies (IFAE), Spain
• Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona, Spain
• Universidad Complutense de Madrid, Spain
• Centro de Investigaciones Energéticas, MedioAmbientales y Tecnológicas (CIEMAT), Spain
• Instituto de Astrofísica de Andalucía, Spain
• Instituto de Astrofísica de Canarias, Spain
• ETHZ, Zürich, Switzerland
• UNIGE, Geneva, Switzerland
• Dipartimento di Fisica and INFN, University of Padua, Italy
• Tuorla Observatory, Piikkiö, Finland
• Dipartimento di Fisica and INFN, University of Siena, Italy
• Dipartimento di Fisica and INFN, University of Udine, Italy
• TU Dortmund University, Germany
• University of Würzburg, Germany
• Max Planck Institute for Physics, Germany
• Institute for Particle Physics, Zürich, Switzerland
• National Institute for Astrophysics (INAF), Italy
• Institute for Nuclear Research and Nuclear Energy, Sofia, Bulgaria
• Croatian MAGIC Consortium (Institute Ruđer Bošković, Zagreb; University of Split, Split; University of Rijeka, Rijeka), Croatia