Ponente
Descripción
The Cherenkov Telescope Array Observatory (CTAO) will be the next-generation ground-based gamma-ray observatory, with two arrays in both hemispheres offering full-sky coverage and improved sensitivity over a broad energy range, from 20 GeV to 300 TeV. The standard pointing mode, where all telescopes are aligned to observe the same sky region, provides excellent performance in terms of sensitivity and reconstruction accuracy. These high-level capabilities make CTAO particularly effective for targeted observations and short-exposure surveys, enabling high-quality sky mapping with high angular resolution and accurate background separation.
As a complementary approach, a divergent pointing strategy has been proposed, where telescopes are slightly offset from a central direction to increase the array’s instantaneous field of view. This mode is particularly promising for wide-area surveys, such as the extra-galactic survey, and for the follow-up of loosely localized transient events (e.g., gravitational wave or neutrino alerts). The increased sky coverage, however, results in a reduction of angular and energy resolution, requiring dedicated performance optimization strategy. In this contribution, we present simulation-based studies aimed at implementing and optimizing divergent pointing configurations. We focus on evaluating the array performance across the extended field of view, in view of their application to CTAO science use cases.
