Search for tiny or transient sources in the Galaxy's central regions with H.E.S.S. - Application to the study of supernova W49B's remnant region

H.E.S.S. (High Energy Stereoscopic System) is an array of four very-high energy (VHE) gamma-ray telescopes located in Namibia. These telescopes use the atmospheric Cherenkov imaging technique to detect gamma-rays between 100 GeV and a few tens of TeV. The H.E.S.S. cameras, each composed of 960 photomultiplier tubes and a fast electronics, need an accurate calibration of the shower to electronic signal conversion. A spurious capacitive coupling between the photomultiplier tubes and the data acquisition system (the common modes) was revealed and corrected during this thesis, resulting in data of better quality. H.E.S.S. is ideally located to observe the inner regions of the Galactic plane. Hence, the Galactic Plane Survey has been one of the primary goal since the beginning of the array operation in 2004 and led to unveiling the diversity of the VHE gamma-ray sources. This thesis presents the search for VHE gamma-ray sources in the inner regions of the Galactic plane using the most sensitive semi-analytical model based analysis currently available. A search for transient sources was also performed for these regions using powerful methods based on the time difference between consecutive events. These methods have been precisely characterized by simulation and didn't lead to the detection of significant variable sources. The very-high energy gamma-ray emission from the W49 region and the supernova remnant W49B in particular has been revealed during this thesis. The analysis of this region and the implications of this discovery are described in detail in this manuscript. (author)