Prospects of γ-ray bursts detecting at very high energy with the High Altitude Detection of Astronomical Radiation experiment

Many theoretical works have predicted the existence of very high energy (VHE :> 100 GeV) γ-ray emission from Gamma-Ray Bursts (GRBs) in both the prompt and the afterglow phases. Observation of such high energy emission, especially in the prompt phase will provide critical information for us to understand the nature of mechanisms of radiation and jet, Lorentz invariance violation, relativistic bulk motion, and so on. Years of effort in observing afterglow phase emission has finally borne fruit recently, yet the prompt phase’s detection has eluded current instruments thus far. A wide field-of-view (FoV) and large effective area below to tens of GeV are essential to detect VHE emissions from GRBs in the prompt phase. The High Altitude Detection of Astronomical Radiation (HADAR) experiment, a wide FoV atmospheric Cherenkov telescope array, has these virtues. We here report on the estimates of its annual GRB detection rate. According to the experiment’s performance, our calculations are based on a phenomenological model to generate the pseudo-GRB population to obtain the number of signals from GRBs and backgrounds, at last, give the detection rate. Results indicate that detection rate of GRB for HADAR experiment is about 3 per year, which slightly changes with characteristics of the VHE extra components of the modeled GRB population. Moveover, the sensitivity of event fluence of GRBs at different distances is given.