No Arabic abstract
TARA (Telescope Array Radar) is a cosmic ray radar detection experiment colocated with Telescope Array, the conventional surface scintillation detector (SD) and fluorescence telescope detector (FD) near Delta, Utah, U.S.A. The TARA detector combines a 40 kW, 54.1 MHz VHF transmitter and high-gain transmitting antenna which broadcasts the radar carrier over the SD array and within the FD field of view, towards a 250 MS/s DAQ receiver. TARA has been collecting data since 2013 with the primary goal of observing the radar signatures of extensive air showers (EAS). Simulations indicate that echoes are expected to be short in duration (~10 microseconds) and exhibit rapidly changing frequency, with rates on the order of 1 MHz/microsecond. The EAS radar cross-section (RCS) is currently unknown although it is the subject of over 70 years of speculation. A novel signal search technique is described in which the expected radar echo of a particular air shower is used as a matched filter template and compared to waveforms obtained by triggering the radar DAQ using the Telescope Array fluorescence detector. No evidence for the scattering of radio frequency radiation by EAS is obtained to date. We report the first quantitative RCS upper limits using EAS that triggered the Telescope Array Fluorescence Detector.
We investigate the possibility of detecting extensive air showers by the radar technique. Considering a bistatic radar system and different shower geometries, we simulate reflection of radio waves off the static plasma produced by the shower in the air. Using the Thomson cross-section for radio wave reflection, we obtain the time evolution of the signal received by the antennas. The frequency upshift of the radar echo and the power received are studied to verify the feasibility of the radar detection technique.
We report the first direct measurement of the overall characteristics of microwave radio emission from extensive air showers. Using a trigger provided by the KASCADE-Grande air shower array, the signals of the microwave antennas of the CROME (Cosmic-Ray Observation via Microwave Emission) experiment have been read out and searched for signatures of radio emission by high-energy air showers in the GHz frequency range. Microwave signals have been detected for more than 30 showers with energies above 3*10^16 eV. The observations presented in this Letter are consistent with a mainly forward-directed and polarised emission process in the GHz frequency range. The measurements show that microwave radiation offers a new means of studying air showers at energies above 10^17 eV.
Radio detection of extensive air showers initiated in the Earths atmosphere has made tremendous progress in the last decade. Today, radio detection is routinely used in several cosmic-ray observatories. The physics of the radio emission in air showers is well-understood, and analysis techniques have been developed to determine the arrival direction, the energy and an estimate for the mass of the primary particle from the radio measurements. The achieved resolutions are competitive with those of more traditional techniques. In this article, I shortly review the most important achievements and discuss the potential for future applications.
We describe a method of reconstructing air showers induced by cosmic rays using deep learning techniques. We simulate an observatory consisting of ground-based particle detectors with fixed locations on a regular grid. The detectors responses to traversing shower particles are signal amplitudes as a function of time, which provide information on transverse and longitudinal shower properties. In order to take advantage of convolutional network techniques specialized in local pattern recognition, we convert all information to the image-like grid of the detectors. In this way, multiple features, such as arrival times of the first particles and optimized characterizations of time traces, are processed by the network. The reconstruction quality of the cosmic ray arrival direction turns out to be competitive with an analytic reconstruction algorithm. The reconstructed shower direction, energy and shower depth show the expected improvement in resolution for higher cosmic ray energy.
Precise measurements of the radio emission by cosmic ray air showers require an adequate treatment of noise. Unlike to usual experiments in particle physics, where noise always adds to the signal, radio noise can in principle decrease or increase the signal if it interferes by chance destructively or constructively. Consequently, noise cannot simply be subtracted from the signal, and its influence on amplitude and time measurement of radio pulses must be studied with care. First, noise has to be determined consistently with the definition of the radio signal which typically is the maximum field strength of the radio pulse. Second, the average impact of noise on radio pulse measurements at individual antennas is studied for LOPES. It is shown that a correct treatment of noise is especially important at low signal-to-noise ratios: noise can be the dominant source of uncertainty for pulse height and time measurements, and it can systematically flatten the slope of lateral distributions. The presented method can also be transfered to other experiments in radio and acoustic detection of cosmic rays and neutrinos.