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Register a new userRadio detection of air showers with the ARIANNA experiment on the Ross Ice Shelf
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The ARIANNA hexagonal radio array (HRA) is an experiment in its pilot phase designed to detect cosmogenic neutrinos of energies above 10^16 eV. The most neutrino-like background stems from the radio emission of air showers. This article reports on dedicated efforts of simulating and detecting the signals of cosmic rays. A description of the fully radio self-triggered data-set, the properties of the detected air shower signals in the frequency range of unit[100-500]{MHz} and the consequences for neutrino detection are given. 38 air shower signals are identified by their distinct waveform characteristics, are in good agreement with simulations and their signals provide evidence that neutrino-induced radio signals will be distinguishable with high efficiency in ARIANNA. The cosmic ray flux at a mean energy of $6.5^{+1.2}_{-1.0}times10^{17}$ eV is measured to be $1.1^{+1.0}_{-0.7}times10^{-16}$ eV$^{-1}$km$^{-2}$sr$^{-1}$yr$^{-1}$ and one five-fold coincident event is used to illustrate the capabilities of the ARIANNA detector to reconstruct arrival direction and energy of air showers.
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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 report on a measurement of thermal neutrons, generated by the hadronic component of extensive air showers (EAS), by means of a small array of EN-detectors developed for the PRISMA project (PRImary Spectrum Measurement Array), novel devices based on a compound alloy of ZnS(Ag) and $^{6}$LiF. This array has been operated within the ARGO-YBJ experiment at the high altitude Cosmic Ray Observatory in Yangbajing (Tibet, 4300 m a.s.l.). Due to the tight correlation between the air shower hadrons and thermal neutrons, this technique can be envisaged as a simple way to estimate the number of high energy hadrons in EAS. Coincident events generated by primary cosmic rays of energies greater than 100 TeV have been selected and analyzed. The EN-detectors have been used to record simultaneously thermal neutrons and the air shower electromagnetic component. The density distributions of both components and the total number of thermal neutrons have been measured. The correlation of these data with the measurements carried out by ARGO-YBJ confirms the excellent performance of the EN-detector.
Radio-glaciological parameters from Moores Bay, in the Ross Ice Shelf, have been measured. The thickness of the ice shelf in Moores Bay was measured from reflection times of radio-frequency pulses propagating vertically through the shelf and reflecting from the ocean, and is found to be $576pm8$ m. Introducing a baseline of 543$pm$7 m between radio transmitter and receiver allowed the computation of the basal reflection coefficient, $R$, separately from englacial loss. The depth-averaged attenuation length of the ice column, $<L >$ is shown to depend linearly on frequency. The best fit (95% confidence level) is $<L( u) >= (460pm20)-(180pm40) u$ m (20 dB/km), for the frequencies $ u=$[0.100-0.850] GHz, assuming no reflection loss. The mean electric-field reflection coefficient is $sqrt{R}=0.82pm0.07$ (-1.7 dB reflection loss) across [0.100-0.850] GHz, and is used to correct the attenuation length. Finally, the reflected power rotated into the orthogonal antenna polarization is less than 5% below 0.400 GHz, compatible with air propagation. The results imply that Moores Bay serves as an appropriate medium for the ARIANNA high energy neutrino detector.
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.
Installation of the ARIANNA Hexagonal Radio Array (HRA) on the Ross Ice Shelf of Antarctica has been completed. This detector serves as a pilot program to the ARIANNA neutrino telescope, which aims to measure the diffuse flux of very high energy neutrinos by observing the radio pulse generated by neutrino-induced charged particle showers in the ice. All HRA stations ran reliably and took data during the entire 2014-2015 austral summer season. A new radio signal direction reconstruction procedure is described, and is observed to have a resolution better than a degree. The reconstruction is used in a preliminary search for potential neutrino candidate events in the data from one of the newly installed detector stations. Three cuts are used to separate radio backgrounds from neutrino signals. The cuts are found to filter out all data recorded by the station during the season while preserving 85.4% of simulated neutrino events that trigger the station. This efficiency is similar to that found in analyses of previous HRA data taking seasons.
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