On May 17,LHAASO, a major national science and technology infrastructure project, held a press conference in Beijing, announcing the detection of 1.4pev (1pev = 10 billion EV) γ Photons, the highest energy ever detected, from the star forming region of Cygnus.“Evidence of the presence of a proton PeVatron has been found in the Galactic Centre, according to the detection of a hard-spectrum radiation extending to 0.04 PeV (ref. 2). Although γ-rays with energies slightly higher than 0.1 PeV have been reported from a few objects in the Galactic plane3^,4^,5^,6, unbiased identification and in-depth exploration of PeVatrons requires detection of γ-rays with energies well above 0.1 PeV. Here we report the detection of more than 530 photons at energies above 100 teraelectronvolts and up to 1.4 PeV from 12 ultrahigh-energy γ-ray sources with a statistical significance greater than seven standard deviations.”(Abstract)

The scientific discoveries have been published in Nature under the title of " Ultrahigh-energy Photons up to 1.4 Petaelectronvolts from 12 γ-ray Galactic Sources”. Prof. Chaowen Yang, Associate Professor Rong Zhou, Associate Professor Zhonghai Wang and Associate Professor Mingming Kang of the College of Physics are co-authors of the paper.

LHAASO is a major national technology infrastructure built in Mount Haizi, Daocheng County, Sichuan Province. SCU is an important member of the construction project. The radiation detection and nuclear electronics research group of the College of Physics has undertaken the research and development of readout electronics for two of LHAASO's three detectors: water Cerenkov detector and atmospheric Cerenkov telescope. Among them, the detection range of atmospheric Cerenkov telescope is 0.1pev to 100pev, which is the highest energy detector of LHAASO project.

LHAASO sky map at energies above 100 TeV.

https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-021-03498-z