Subscribe to the gold package and get unlimited access to Shamra Academy
Register a new userSymmetrizing the signal distribution of radio emission from inclined air showers
140
0
0.0
(
0
)
Ask ChatGPT about the research
No Arabic abstract
Radio detection of inclined air showers currently receives special attention. It can be performed with very sparse antenna arrays and yields a pure measurement of the electromagnetic air-shower component, thus delivering information that is highly complementary to the measurement of the muonic component using particle detectors. However, radio-based reconstruction of inclined air showers is challenging in light of asymmetries induced in the radio-signal distribution by early-late effects as well as the superposition of geomagnetic and charge-excess radiation. We present a model for the signal distribution of radio emission from inclined air showers which allows explicit compensation of these asymmetries. In a first step, geometrical early-late asymmetries are removed. Secondly, a universal parameterization of the charge-excess fraction as a function of the air-shower geometry, the atmospheric density profile and the lateral distance from the shower axis is used to compensate for the charge-excess contribution to the signal. The resulting signal distribution of the pure geomagnetic emission is then fit with a rotationally symmetric lateral distribution function, the area integration of which yields the radiation energy as an estimator for the cosmic-ray energy. We present the details and performance of our model, which lays the foundation for robust and precise reconstruction of inclined air showers from radio measurements.
rate research
Read More
Radio detection of inclined air showers is currently receiving great attention. To exploit the potential, a suitable event reconstruction needs to be developed. The first step in this direction is the development of a model for the lateral distribution of the radio signals, which in the case of inclined air showers exhibits asymmetries due to early-late effects in addition to the usual asymmetries from the superposition of charge-excess and geomagnetic emission. We present a model which corrects for all asymmetries and successfully describes the lateral distribution of the energy fluence with a rotationally symmetric function. This gives access to the radiation energy as a measure of the energy of the cosmic-ray primary, and is also sensitive to the depth of the shower maximum.
With the Auger Engineering Radio Array (AERA) of the Pierre Auger Observatory, we have observed the radio emission from 561 extensive air showers with zenith angles between 60$^circ$ and 84$^circ$. In contrast to air showers with more vertical incidence, these inclined air showers illuminate large ground areas of several km$^2$ with radio signals detectable in the 30 to 80,MHz band. A comparison of the measured radio-signal amplitudes with Monte Carlo simulations of a subset of 50 events for which we reconstruct the energy using the Auger surface detector shows agreement within the uncertainties of the current analysis. As expected for forward-beamed radio emission undergoing no significant absorption or scattering in the atmosphere, the area illuminated by radio signals grows with the zenith angle of the air shower. Inclined air showers with EeV energies are thus measurable with sparse radio-antenna arrays with grid sizes of a km or more. This is particularly attractive as radio detection provides direct access to the energy in the electromagnetic cascade of an air shower, which in case of inclined air showers is not accessible by arrays of particle detectors on the ground.
We report here on a novel analysis of the complete set of four Stokes parameters that uniquely determine the linear and/or circular polarization of the radio signal for an extensive air shower. The observed dependency of the circular polarization on azimuth angle and distance to the shower axis is a clear signature of the interfering contributions from two different radiation mechanisms, a main contribution due to a geomagnetically-induced transverse current and a secondary component due to the build-up of excess charge at the shower front. The data, as measured at LOFAR, agree very well with a calculation from first principles. This opens the possibility to use circular polarization as an investigative tool in the analysis of air shower structure, such as for the determination of atmospheric electric fields.
The antenna array LOPES is set up at the location of the KASCADE-Grande extensive air shower experiment in Karlsruhe, Germany and aims to measure and investigate radio pulses from Extensive Air Showers. The coincident measurements allow us to reconstruct the electric field strength at observation level in dependence of general EAS parameters. In the present work, the lateral distribution of the radio signal in air showers is studied in detail. It is found that the lateral distributions of the electric field strengths in individual EAS can be described by an exponential function. For about 20% of the events a flattening towards the shower axis is observed, preferentially for showers with large inclination angle. The estimated scale parameters R0 describing the slope of the lateral profiles range between 100 and 200 m. No evidence for a direct correlation of R0 with shower parameters like azimuth angle, geomagnetic angle, or primary energy can be found. This indicates that the lateral profile is an intrinsic property of the radio emission during the shower development which makes the radio detection technique suitable for large scale applications.
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.
Log in to be able to interact and post comments
comments
Fetching comments
Sign in to be able to follow your search criteria
