Results from the Milagrito experiment

The Milagro water Cherenkov detector near Los Alamos, New Mexico is the first air shower detector capable of continuously monitoring the sky at energies between 500 GeV and 20 TeV. Preliminary results of the Milagro experiment are presented. A predecessor of the Milagro detector, Milagrito, was operational from February 1997 to May 1998. Milagrito consisted of 228 8'' photomultiplier tubes (PMTs) arranged in a grid with a 2.8 meter spacing and submerged in 1-2 meters of water. During its operation, Milagrito collected in excess of 9 billion events with a median energy of about 3 TeV. The detector's sensitivity extends below 1 TeV for showers from near zenith. The results of an all sky search for the Milagrito data for both transient and DC sources will be presented, including the Crab Nebula and active galaxies Markarian 501 and 421, which are known sources of TeV gamma-rays. Also presented will be a study of the TeV emission from gamma ray bursts (GRBs) in Milagrito's field of view detected by the BATSE experiment on the Compton Gamma-Ray Observatory