Very high energy sky monitoring with the Southern Widefield Gamma-ray Observatory

¹ Laboratório de Instrumentação e Física Experimental de Partículas (LIP), Avenida Prof. Gama Pinto 2, 1649-003 Lisboa, Portugal
² Brazilian Center for Physics Research (CBPF), Rua Dr. Xavier Sigaud 150, 22290-180 Rio de Janeiro, Brazil
³ IFPU - Institute for Fundamental Physics of the Universe, Via Beirut 2, I-34014 Trieste, Italy
⁴ INFN, Sezione di Trieste, via A. Valerio 2, I-34100 Trieste, Italy
⁵ Dipartimento di Fisica, Università degli Studi di Trieste, via A. Valerio 2, I-34100 Trieste, Italy

^* e-mail: glamura@lip.pt

Published online: 20 March 2023

Abstract

The Southern Wide-field Gamma-ray Observatory (SWGO) is the proposal for a new ground-based γ-ray instrument in the Southern Hemisphere, which will use an array of water-Cherenkov particle detectors to provide continuous monitoring of a large portion of the sky at the very- and ultra-high-energies (VHE and UHE, respectively). At the low energy side, SWGO aims to push the observational range of wide-field ground-based γ-ray facilities down to a few hundred GeV, thus bridging the gap between space and ground-based facilities in the monitoring of the VHE sky. In the high energy domain, on the contrary, it will benefit from the optimal coverage of the Galactic Plane to map the distribution of UHE sources in the inner parts of the Galactic disk and close to the Galactic Center, leading to an extraordinary improvement in our ability to identify their most likely counterparts. In this contribution, we describe the concept of SWGO and its potential to constrain the physics of VHE emission and particle acceleration in γ-ray sources powered by relativistic jets and energetic shocks. We finally discuss its role within the global network of multi-messenger facilities.