Prof. Buckley’s Washington University group was a founding member of the collaboration that developed and proposed VERITAS, a high energy gamma-ray observatory in Southern Arizona.
Buckley’s group at WU working with the WU engineering group (Bose, Braun, Dowkontt, Olevitch and Simburger) built the high-speed camera electronics capable of imaging electromagnetic-showers induced by TeV gamma-rays at a frame rate of 500 million frames/sec. The VERITAS observatory has made numerous discoveries including the detection of rapid gamma-ray flares from supermassive black holes in active galaxies, the discovery of very high energy pulsed radiation from the crab nebula, the first detection of gamma-rays from cosmic-ray interactions in a starburst galaxy, detection of periodic emission from black hole binary systems, and TeV gamma-ray images of supernova remnants providing direct evidence for the origin of cosmic rays (partially resolving a 100 year old mystery). VERITAS was funded by the NSF, based on initial seed funding from sources including Washington University and the McDonnell Center for Space Sciences.
