ARGO-YBJ experiment and TeV gamma astronomy

The ARGO-YBJ detector is an extensive air shower array consisting of a carpet of Resistive Plate Chambers (RPCs). Very high energy (VHE) gamma ray astronomy is the main scientific goal of this Chinese-Italian experiment. High altitude and full coverage ensure a low energy threshold (few hundreds of GeV for primary photons), high duty-cycle and large field of view allow a continuous sky survey in the declination range from −10° to +70°. Also many features of the high energy cosmic rays are studied by ARGO-YBJ exploiting the unprecented shower reconstruction.