ARGO-YBJ: Highlights and Prospects

Abstract

The ARGO-YBJ experiment has been in stable data taking for 5 years at the YangBaJing Cosmic Ray Laboratory (Tibet, P.R. China, 4300 m a.s.l., 606 g/cm²). With a duty-cycle greater than 86% the detector collected about 510¹¹ events in a wide energy range, from few hundreds GeV up to the PeV. A number of open problems in cosmic ray physics has been faced exploiting dierent analyses. In this paper we summarize the last results in gamma-ray astronomy and in the cosmic ray physics and introduce the LHAASO project, mainly driven by the Chinese community, to study the cosmic ray physics up to 10¹⁷ eV.