Variance computation of the test statistic for the utility function in the SWGO experiment

The SWGO (Southern Wide-Field Gamma-Ray Observatory) experiment was proposed to study the very high-energy gamma rays that strike the Earth’s atmosphere. These particles are produced within active galactic nuclei or other violent phenomena in the universe; their direction of incidence allows their sources to be identified and studied in detail. The experiment consists of an array of several thousand Cherenkov detectors placed at high altitude, which detect the flow of secondary particles produced by electromagnetic cascades initiated by gamma rays. This thesis studied the optimization of the layout of these detectors using a gradient descent algorithm. Specifically, an algorithm was developed to estimate the variance of the test statistic used to discriminate the gamma ray signal from the background, consisting of cosmic rays (protons and light nuclei).