The Future of Cherenkov Astronomy

Abstract

In the last ten years, the field of Cherenkov astronomy has become an important contributor to high energy astrophysics with the detection of eight objects at energies above 300 GeV. These observations have advanced our understanding of active galactic nuclei, supernova remnants, the extragalactic background light and cosmic-ray acceleration and production. Several efforts are now underway to develop new Cherenkov telescopes which will cover a wider range of energies (10 GeV - 50 TeV), improve the flux sensitivity by at least an order of magnitude and provide more accurate measures of particle energy and direction. I describe some of the new Cherenkov telescopes and discuss their potential to improve our understanding of astrophysics and fundamental physics.