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The High Altitude Water Cherenkov (HAWC) Observatory, located in central Mexico at 4100 m above sea level, is sensitive to gamma rays from a few hundreds GeV to above 100 TeV . HAWC has an instantaneous field of view of 2 steradians and continuously observes two third of the sky each day. A search for steady sources has been performed and about 40 sources are identified. Most of the identified sources are Galactic sources, however, two extragalactic blazars Mrk 421 and Mrk 501 are detected at high significance. Thanks to its wide field of view, HAWC is also sensitive to extended
structures such as nearby pulsar wind nebulae, Fermi bubbles and diffusion emission. The continuous time coverage allows the search of time variability and transient events, to send alerts or follow-up on multi-messenger events such as LIGO gravitational waves or IceCube neutrinos. I will present recent highlights from the HAWC observatory.
Dr. Zhou's background is in particle astrophysics. He is interested in the study of TeV gamma rays to solve the century-old puzzle of the origin of cosmic rays. Dr. Zhou earned his bachelor degree from Harbin Institute of Technology and his Ph.D. degree
from Michigan Technological University. Since 2016, he has been a postdoctoral research associate at Los Alamos National Laboratory. Dr. Zhou is a member of the High Altitude Water Cherenkov (HAWC) collaboration since 2010, and he is currently the Galactic science coordinator of HAWC. He carries out work on calibration, event reconstruction, and the likelihood analysis of the Galactic TeV gamma ray sources for the HAWC collaboration.