The major upgrade of the MAGIC telescopes, Part I: The hardware improvements and the commissioning of the system

© 2015 Elsevier B.V. Artículo firmado por 167 autores. We would like to thank the Instituto de Astrofísica de Canarias for the excellent working conditions at the Observatorio del Roque de los Muchachos in La Palma. The financial support of the German BMBF and MPG, the Italian INFN and INAF, the Swiss National Fund SNF, the ERDF under the Spanish MINECO, and the Japanese JSPS and MEXT is gratefully acknowledged. This work was also supported by the Centro de Excelencia Severo Ochoa SEV-2012-0234, CPAN CSD2007-00042, and MultiDark CSD2009-00064 projects of the Spanish Consolider-Ingenio 2010 programme, by grant 268740 of the Academy of Finland, by the Croatian Science Foundation (HrZZ) Project 09/176 and the University of Rijeka Project 13.12.1.3.02, by the DFG Collaborative Research Centers SFB823/C4 and SFB876/C3, and by the Polish MNiSzW grant 745/N-HESS-MAGIC/2010/0. We thank the two anonymous referees for thorough reading and helpful comments on the manuscript.
The MAGIC telescopes are two Imaging Atmospheric Cherenkov Telescopes (IACTs) located on the Canary island of La Palma. The telescopes are designed to measure Cherenkov light from air showers initiated by gamma rays in the energy regime from around 50 GeV to more than 50 TeV. The two telescopes were built in 2004 and 2009, respectively, with different cameras, triggers and readout systems. In the years 2011-2012 the MAGIC collaboration undertook a major upgrade to make the stereoscopic system uniform, improving its overall performance and easing its maintenance. In particular, the camera, the receivers and the trigger of the first telescope were replaced and the readout of the two telescopes was upgraded. This paper (Part I) describes the details of the upgrade as well as the basic performance parameters of MAGIC such as raw data treatment, linearity in the electronic chain and sources of noise. In Part II, we describe the physics performance of the upgraded system.
German BMBF and MPG
Italian INFN and INAF
Swiss National Fund SNF
ERDF under the Spanish MINECO
Japanese JSPS
MEXT
Centro de Excelencia Severo Ochoa
Spanish Consolider-Ingenio 2010 programme
Academy of Finland
Croatian Science Foundation (HrZZ)
University of Rijeka
the DFG Collaborative Research Centers
Polish MNiSzW
Depto. de Estructura de la Materia, Física Térmica y Electrónica
Fac. de Ciencias Físicas
TRUE
pub