Background Systematic Studies in VERITAS Data

Abstract

In the analysis of VERITAS and other IACT data, it is expected to get a distribution of statistical significances in sky map bins with mean of zero and width of unity in the absence of a $\gamma$-ray signal. However, it is not uncommon to see significance distributions of width greater than unity, indicating that the background is poorly estimated and the significances in the region of interest are incorrect. This work explores the origins of these wider significance distributions and develop solutions to this issue and test these solutions on samples of VERITAS data.