The survey of the inner Galaxy with H.E.S.S. was remarkably successful in detecting a wide range of new very-high-energy gamma-ray sources. New TeV gamma-ray emitting source classes were established, although several of the sources remain unidentifie
d, and progress has been made in understanding particle acceleration in astrophysical sources. In this work, we constructed a model of a population of such very-high-energy gamma-ray emitters and normalised the flux and size distribution of this population model to the H.E.S.S.-discovered sources. Extrapolating that population of objects to lower flux levels we investigate what a future array of imaging atmospheric telescopes (IACTs) such as AGIS or CTA might detect in a survey of the Inner Galaxy with an order of magnitude improvement in sensitivity. The sheer number of sources detected together with the improved resolving power will likely result in a huge improvement in our understanding of the populations of galactic gamma-ray sources. A deep survey of the inner Milky Way would also support studies of the interstellar diffuse gamma-ray emission in regions of high cosmic-ray density. In the final section of this paper we investigate the science potential for the Galactic Centre region for studying energy-dependent diffusion with such a future array.
The large optical reflector (~ 100 m^2) of a H.E.S.S. Cherenkov telescope was used to search for very fast optical transients of astrophysical origin. 43 hours of observations targeting stellar-mass black holes and neutron stars were obtained using a
dedicated photometer with microsecond time resolution. The photometer consists of seven photomultiplier tube pixels: a central one to monitor the target and a surrounding ring of six pixels to veto background events. The light curves of all pixels were recorded continuously and were searched offline with a matched-filtering technique for flares with a duration of 2 us to 100 ms. As expected, many unresolved (<3 us) and many long (>500 us) background events originating in the earths atmosphere were detected. In the time range 3 to 500 us the measurement is essentially background-free, with only eight events detected in 43 h; five from lightning and three presumably from a piece of space debris. The detection of flashes of brightness ~ 0.1 Jy and only 20 us duration from the space debris shows the potential of this setup to find rare optical flares on timescales of tens of microseconds. This timescale corresponds to the light crossing time of stellar-mass black holes and neutron stars.
The next generation of ground-based gamma-ray observatories, such as e.g. CTA, will consist of about 50-100 telescopes, and cameras with in total ~100000 to ~200000 channels. The telescopes of the core array will cover and effective area of ~ 1 km2 a
nd will be possibly accompanied by a large halo of smaller telescopes spread over about 10 km2 . In order to make maximum use of the stereoscopic approach, a very flexible inter-telescope trigger scheme is needed which allows to couple telescopes that located up to ~1 km apart. The development of a cost effective readout scheme for the camera signals exhibits a major technological challenge. Here we present ideas on a new asynchronous inter-telescope trigger scheme, and a very cost-effective, high-bandwidth frontend to backend data transfer system, both based on standard Ethernet components and an Ethernet front-end interface based on mass production standard FPGAs.
