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Register a new userFinal results of the LOPES radio interferometer for cosmic-ray air showers
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LOPES, the LOFAR prototype station, was an antenna array for cosmic-ray air showers operating from 2003 - 2013 within the KASCADE-Grande experiment. Meanwhile, the analysis is finished and the data of air-shower events measured by LOPES are available with open access in the KASCADE Cosmic Ray Data Center (KCDC). This article intends to provide a summary of the achievements, results, and lessons learned from LOPES. By digital, interferometric beamforming the detection of air showers became possible in the radio-loud environment of the Karlsruhe Institute of Technology (KIT). As a prototype experiment, LOPES tested several antenna types, array configurations and calibration techniques, and pioneered analysis methods for the reconstruction of the most important shower parameters, i.e., the arrival direction, the energy, and mass-dependent observables such as the position of the shower maximum. In addition to a review and update of previously published results, we also present new results based on end-to-end simulations including all known instrumental properties. For this, we applied the detector response to radio signals simulated with the CoREAS extension of CORSIKA, and analyzed them in the same way as measured data. Thus, we were able to study the detector performance more accurately than before, including some previously inaccessible features such as the impact of noise on the interferometric cross-correlation beam. These results led to several improvements, which are documented in this paper and can provide useful input for the design of future cosmic-ray experiments based on the digital radio-detection technique.
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The LOPES experiment, a digital radio interferometer located at KIT (Karlsruhe Institute of Technology), obtained remarkable results for the detection of radio emission from extensive air showers at MHz frequencies. Features of the radio lateral distribution function (LDF) measured by LOPES are explored in this work for a precise reconstruction of two fundamental air shower parameters: the primary energy and the shower Xmax. The method presented here has been developed on (REAS3-)simulations, and is applied to LOPES measurements. Despite the high human-made noise at the LOPES site, it is possible to reconstruct both the energy and Xmax for individual events. On the one hand, the energy resolution is promising and comparable to the one of the co-located KASCADE-Grande experiment. On the other hand, Xmax values are reconstructed with the LOPES measurements with a resolution of 90 g/cm2 . A precision on Xmax better than 30 g/cm2 is predicted and achievable in a region with a lower human-made noise level.
LOPES is a digital antenna array at the Karlsruhe Institute of Technology, Germany, for cosmic-ray air-shower measurements. Triggered by the co-located KASCADE-Grande air-shower array, LOPES detects the radio emission of air showers via digital radio interferometry. We summarize the status of LOPES and recent results. In particular, we present an update on the reconstruction of the primary-particle properties based on almost 500 events above 100 PeV. With LOPES, the arrival direction can be reconstructed with a precision of at least 0.65{deg}, and the energy with a precision of at least 20 %, which, however, does not include systematic uncertainties on the absolute energy scale. For many particle and astrophysics questions the reconstruction of the atmospheric depth of the shower maximum, Xmax, is important, since it yields information on the type of the primary particle and its interaction with the atmosphere. Recently, we found experimental evidence that the slope of the radio lateral distribution is indeed sensitive to the longitudinal development of the air shower, but unfortunately, the Xmax precision at LOPES is limited by the high level of anthropogenic radio background. Nevertheless, the developed methods can be transferred to next generation experiments with lower background, which should provide an Xmax precision competitive to other detection technologies.
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.
We measure the energy emitted by extensive air showers in the form of radio emission in the frequency range from 30 to 80 MHz. Exploiting the accurate energy scale of the Pierre Auger Observatory, we obtain a radiation energy of 15.8 pm 0.7 (stat) pm 6.7 (sys) MeV for cosmic rays with an energy of 1 EeV arriving perpendicularly to a geomagnetic field of 0.24 G, scaling quadratically with the cosmic-ray energy. A comparison with predictions from state-of-the-art first-principle calculations shows agreement with our measurement. The radiation energy provides direct access to the calorimetric energy in the electromagnetic cascade of extensive air showers. Comparison with our result thus allows the direct calibration of any cosmic-ray radio detector against the well-established energy scale of the Pierre Auger Observatory.
We have developed a sophisticated model of the radio emission from extensive air showers in the scheme of coherent geosynchrotron radiation, providing a theoretical foundation for the interpretation of experimental data from current and future experiments. Having verified the model through comparison of analytic calculations, Monte Carlo simulations and historical experimental data, we now present the results of extensive simulations performed with our Monte Carlo code. Important results are the absence of significant asymmetries in the total field strength emission pattern, the spectral dependence of the radiation, the polarization characteristics of the emission (allowing an unambiguous test of the geomagnetic emission mechanism), and the dependence of the radio emission on important air shower and observer parameters such as the shower zenith angle, the primary particle energy, the depth of the shower maximum and the observer position. An analytic parametrization incorporating the aforementioned dependences summarizes our results in a particularly useful way.
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