Discriminating sub-TeV gamma and hadron-induced showers through their footprints Conceição, R. González, B. S. Guillén Perales, Alberto Pimenta, M. Tomé, B. Gamma/hadron discrimination in ground-based gamma-ray observatories at the sub-TeV energy range is challenging as traditional muon-based methods become less effective at lower energies. This work explores a novel gamma/hadron discrimination method for extensive air shower arrays that analyzes the shower signal footprint patterns using a state-of-the-art pretrained vision transformer. The resilience of the method to background noise, such as atmospheric muons and low-energy proton showers, along with its adaptability to different zenith angles and array configurations, demonstrates its potential for application in current and future ground-based gamma-ray observatories. 2025-03-17T11:14:44Z 2025-03-17T11:14:44Z 2025-02-24 journal article Conceição, R. et al. Phys. Rev. D 111, 043047 (2025) [DOI: 10.1103/PhysRevD.111.043047] https://hdl.handle.net/10481/103127 10.1103/PhysRevD.111.043047 eng http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ open access Atribución 4.0 Internacional American Physical Society