No Arabic abstract
CoREAS is a Monte Carlo simulation code for the calculation of radio emission from extensive air showers. It is based on the endpoint formalism for radiation from moving charges implemented directly in CORSIKA. Consequently, the full complexity of the air-shower physics is taken into account without the need for approximations or assumptions on the emission mechanism. We present results of simulations for an unthinned shower performed with CoREAS for both MHz and GHz frequencies. At MHz frequencies, the simulations predict the well-known mixture of geomagnetic and charge excess radiation. At GHz frequencies, the emission is strongly influenced by Cherenkov effects arising from the varying refractive index in the atmosphere. In addition, a qualitative difference in the symmetry of the GHz radiation pattern is observed when compared to the ones at lower frequencies. We also discuss the strong increase in the ground area subtended by the radio emission when going from near-vertical to very inclined geometries, making very inclined air showers the most promising ones for cosmic ray radio detection.
CoREAS is a Monte Carlo code for the simulation of radio emission from extensive air showers. It implements the endpoint formalism for the calculation of electromagnetic radiation directly in CORSIKA. As such, it is parameter-free, makes no assumptions on the emission mechanism for the radio signals, and takes into account the complete complexity of the electron and positron distributions as simulated by CORSIKA. In this article, we illustrate the capabilities of CoREAS with simulations carried out in different frequency ranges from tens of MHz up to GHz frequencies, and describe in particular the emission characteristics at high frequencies due to Cherenkov effects arising from the varying refractive index of the atmosphere.
We present LOFAR measurements of radio emission from extensive air showers. We find that this emission is strongly polarized, with a median degree of polarization of nearly $99%$, and that the angle between the polarization direction of the electric field and the Lorentz force acting on the particles, depends on the observer location in the shower plane. This can be understood as a superposition of the radially polarized charge-excess emission mechanism, first proposed by Askaryan and the geomagnetic emission mechanism proposed by Kahn and Lerche. We calculate the relative strengths of both contributions, as quantified by the charge-excess fraction, for $163$ individual air showers. We find that the measured charge-excess fraction is higher for air showers arriving from closer to the zenith. Furthermore, the measured charge-excess fraction also increases with increasing observer distance from the air shower symmetry axis. The measured values range from $(3.3pm 1.0)%$ for very inclined air showers at $25, mathrm{m}$ to $(20.3pm 1.3)%$ for almost vertical showers at $225, mathrm{m}$. Both dependencies are in qualitative agreement with theoretical predictions.
We present time-domain Monte Carlo simulations of radio emission from cosmic ray air showers in the scheme of coherent geosynchrotron radiation. Our model takes into account the important air shower characteristics such as the lateral and longitudinal particle distributions, the particle track length and energy distributions, a realistic magnetic field geometry and the shower evolution as a whole. The Monte Carlo approach allows us to retain the full polarisation information and to carry out the calculations without the need for any far-field approximations. We demonstrate the strategies developed to tackle the computational effort associated with the simulation of a huge number of particles for a great number of observer bins and illustrate the robustness and accuracy of these techniques. We predict the emission pattern, the radial and the spectral dependence of the radiation from a prototypical 10^17 eV vertical air shower and find good agreement with our analytical results (Huege & Falcke 2003) and the available historical data. Track-length effects in combination with magnetic field effects surprisingly wash out any significant asymmetry in the total field strength emission pattern in spite of the magnetic field geometry. While statistics of total field strengths alone can therefore not prove the geomagnetic origin, the predicted high degree of polarisation in the direction perpendicular to the shower and magnetic field axes allows a direct test of the geomagnetic emission mechanism with polarisation-sensitive experiments such as LOPES. Our code provides a robust, yet flexible basis for detailed studies of the dependence of the radio emission on specific shower parameters and for the inclusion of additional radiation mechanism in the future.
The Moscow State University Extensive Air Shower (EAS-MSU) array studied high-energy cosmic rays with primary energies ~(1-500) PeV in the Northern hemisphere. The EAS-MSU data are being revisited following recently found indications to an excess of muonless showers, which may be interpreted as the first observation of cosmic gamma rays at ~100 PeV. In this paper, we present a complete Monte-Carlo model of the surface detector which results in a good agreement between data and simulations. The model allows us to study the performance of the detector and will be used to obtain physical results in further studies.
The radio intensity and polarization footprint of a cosmic-ray induced extensive air shower is determined by the time-dependent structure of the current distribution residing in the plasma cloud at the shower front. In turn, the time dependence of the integrated charge-current distribution in the plasma cloud, the longitudinal shower structure, is determined by interesting physics which one would like to extract such as the location and multiplicity of the primary cosmic-ray collision or the values of electric fields in the atmosphere during thunderstorms. To extract the structure of a shower from its footprint requires solving a complicated inverse problem. For this purpose we have developed a code that semi-analytically calculates the radio footprint of an extensive air shower given an arbitrary longitudinal structure. This code can be used in a optimization procedure to extract the optimal longitudinal shower structure given a radio footprint. On the basis of air-shower universality we propose a simple parametrization of the structure of the plasma cloud. This parametrization is based on the results of Monte-Carlo shower simulations. Deriving the parametrization also teaches which aspects of the plasma cloud are important for understanding the features seen in the radio-emission footprint. The calculated radio footprints are compared with microscopic CoREAS simulations.