Speaker
Description
The Cherenkov Telescope Array (CTA) is the next generation observatory of ground-based Imaging Atmospheric Cherenkov Telescopes (IACTs). The observatory, currently under construction, will be composed of more than 70 telescopes at two locations: in the northern hemisphere, CTAO-N at the Observatorio del Roque de Los Muchachos (ORM, La Palma, Canary Islands, Spain), and in the southern hemisphere, CTAO-S at a site belonging to the European Southern Observatory (ESO, Cerro Paranal, Chile). IACTs indirectly detect cosmic gamma rays in an energy range from tens of GeV to several hundreds of TeV by measuring Cherenkov light, emitted by atmospheric showers of secondary particles produced through interactions between incident gamma rays and particles in upper layers of the atmosphere. CTAO's size will increase detection sensitivity in this energy range by a factor of 5 - 10 with respect to present experiments and aim for improved energy and angular resolution as well as greatly reduced systematic uncertainties. The key to reaching the improvements in accuracy on the absolute energy and flux scales is the precise monitoring of the atmospheric properties for the Cherenkov light, which can be obtained with a specifically designed LIDAR. The Barcelona Raman LIDAR (BRL) is the official CTA-N Pathfinder prototype and was deployed at ORM for extensive tests between February 2021 and May 2022. We report the BRL project's prospects for the CTAO-N, emphasizing the technical implementation and the preliminary data taken during its deployment period.
