Atmospheric Cherenkov Technique in Very High Energy Gamma-ray Astronomy :
High energy cosmic rays and gamma-rays bombarding the Earth's atmosphere
generate showers of particles through nuclear interaction with atmospheric
nuclei and electromagnetic cascade processes.
Charged particles in showers traveling faster than the speed of light
in atmosphere
(slower than that in vacuum) emitts photons known as Cherenkov radiation.
These photons reach the ground in a cone of about 1 degree
and can be detected as a light flash by collecting them
with a reflector and taking its image by an ultra-fast camera.
Though showers may originate from cosmic ray nuclei which form
background for gamma-ray sky, gamma-rays can
be selected using image parameters since nucler showers show
more diffuse images and come from random direction while gamma-ray
showers are expected to come from a point
source (in most cases) and have preferred direction.
* Air Cherenkov Detectors (NASA Imagine the Universe!)
* Ogio-san's page (in Japanese)
* Air shower technique in the cosmic ray study (in Japanese)
* See more experiments.