This proposal requests funds to support the University of Maryland group in their participation in the Milagro experiment. This detector is a new type of water-Cherenkov, extensive air shower detector designed to look at very high-energy (VHE) gamma rays coming from energetic objects in space. The detector is located near Los Alamos, NM at an altitude of 2630 m. It consists of a ~5000 m2 central pond detector surrounded by an array of 175 instrumented water tanks (outriggers) that span an area of roughly 40,000 m2. It is complementary to ground-based atmospheric-Cherenkov telescopes (ACTs) by observing where and when ACTs cannot and to satellite experiments by having a much larger effective area at high energies. These features make it an ideal instrument to search for emission from unknown sources and to study and potentially discover Gamma Ray Bursts (GRBs) in VHE gamma rays. The experiment is now moving into a new phase of operation with a full detector and a new trigger system.
In the education/outreach area, the group has been active in exposing students and the general public to the excitement of the particle astrophysics field. Recently, Milagro became one of the first particle astrophysics experiments to join the QuarkNet program and involve classroom teachers in their research.
