Fermi-LAT
The Fermi Large Area Telescope
The Fermi Large Area Telescope (Fermi-LAT) is a gamma-ray experiment installed on the Fermi Gamma-ray Space Telescope. It has been detecting photons in the energy range between 30 mega-electronvolts (MeV) and 300 giga-electronvolts (GeV) since 2008.
In contrast to ground-based experiments, the Fermi-LAT has a very large field of view: at any moment of time, it can see approximately 20% of the sky. In survey mode, it covers the whole sky in two orbits around the Earth, which takes about 3 hours.
The large field of view and almost continuous monitoring of the whole sky make it an ideal instrument to study both, constant as well as flaring and burst-like sources, such as flares of super-massive black holes in other galaxies, gamma-ray bursts, and solar flare.
Fermi-LAT has detected thousands of gamma-ray sources in our Galaxy and beyond. Most of the sources are active galactic nuclei, which are super-massive black holes that accrete matter and emit a jets pointing towards the Earth. LAT has detected more than 200 pulsars in our Galaxy, which significantly improved our understanding of the physics of these fascinating objects (the previous gamma-ray telescope, EGRET, detected only 6). Fermi-LAT has also made some unexpected discoveries, such as the gamma-ray emission from novae.
Apart from the observation of point sources, Fermi-LAT has made an exquisite measurement of the diffuse gamma-ray emission, most of which comes from interactions of Galactic cosmic rays with interstellar gas and radiation fields. There are surprise discoveries in the diffuse emission as well, such as the huge bubbles above and below the Galactic center and the excess of gamma-ray emission near the Galactic center itself.
Fore more information, you can visit the project webpage or follow Fermi on Twitter.
Fermi-LAT at ECAP
At ECAP we work on diffuse gamma-ray data analysis and interpretation of the large-scale emission components, such as the Fermi bubbles and the Galactic center excess. We also work on data-driven methods for point source analysis, such as the wavelet transform.
If you are interested in a Bachelor or Master thesis with our Fermi-LAT group, please contact:
An overview of all thesis topics can be found here.