Radio Pulses from Extensive Air Showers

Allan, H. R.; Clay, R. W.; Jones, James

doi:10.1038/2271116a0

Cited by 29 publications

(24 citation statements)

References 4 publications

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“…In this difficult situation, we choose to revert to the well documented data of Allan et al (1970) as the basis of our analysis. A comparison of these data with our predicted radial dependence of the emission is shown in Fig.…”

Section: Comparison With Experimental Datamentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Regarding the spectral dependence, we make use of the Spencer (1969) data as presented, converted and complemented in Allan (1971) as well as the Prah (1971) data. These data sets, again, yield considerably lower values of ν , and we manually scale them up to make them consistent with the Allan et al (1970) radial data. While the absolute values presented in Fig.…”

Section: Comparison With Experimental Datamentioning

confidence: 99%

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Radio emission from cosmic ray air showers

Huege¹,

Falcke

2003

A&A

144

154

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Abstract. Cosmic ray air showers have been known for over 30 years to emit pulsed radio emission in the frequency range from a few to a few hundred MHz, an effect that offers great opportunities for the study of extensive air showers with upcoming fully digital "software radio telescopes" such as LOFAR and the enhancement of particle detector arrays such as KASCADE Grande or the Pierre Auger Observatory. However, there are still a lot of open questions regarding the strength of the emission as well as the underlying emission mechanism. Accompanying the development of a LOFAR prototype station dedicated to the observation of radio emission from extensive air showers, LOPES, we therefore take a new approach to modeling the emission process, interpreting it as "coherent geosynchrotron emission" from electron-positron pairs gyrating in the earth's magnetic field. We develop our model in a step-by-step procedure incorporating increasingly realistic shower geometries in order to disentangle the coherence effects arising from the different scales present in the air shower structure and assess their influence on the spectrum and radial dependence of the emitted radiation. We infer that the air shower "pancake" thickness directly limits the frequency range of the emitted radiation, while the radial dependence of the emission is mainly governed by the intrinsic beaming cone of the synchrotron radiation and the superposition of the emission over the air shower evolution as a whole. Our model succeeds in reproducing the qualitative trends in the emission spectrum and radial dependence that were observed in the past, and is consistent with the absolute level of the emission within the relatively large systematic errors in the experimental data.

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Section: Comparison With Experimental Datamentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Comparison With Experimental Datamentioning

confidence: 99%

Radio emission from cosmic ray air showers

Huege¹,

Falcke

2003

A&A

144

154

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show abstract

“…As this air shower passes through the atmosphere and the Earth's magnetic field, it emits radiation, which can be measured by antennas on the ground in a broad range of radio frequencies (MHz -GHz) [1,2,3]. For a review of recent developments in the field see [4].…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

The shape of the radio wavefront of extensive air showers as measured with LOFAR

Corstanje

Schellart

Nelles

et al. 2015

Astroparticle Physics

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Extensive air showers, induced by high energy cosmic rays impinging on the Earth's atmosphere, produce radio emission that is measured with the LOFAR radio telescope. As the emission comes from a finite distance of a few kilometers, the incident wavefront is non-planar. A spherical, conical or hyperbolic shape of the wavefront has been proposed, but measurements of individual air showers have been inconclusive so far. For a selected high-quality sample of 161 measured extensive air showers, we have reconstructed the wavefront by measuring pulse arrival times to sub-nanosecond precision in 200 to 350 individual antennas. For each measured air shower, we have fitted a conical, spherical, and hyperboloid shape to the arrival times. The fit quality and a likelihood analysis show that a hyperboloid is the best parametrization. Using a non-planar wavefront shape gives an improved angular resolution, when reconstructing the shower arrival direction. Furthermore, a dependence of the wavefront shape on the shower geometry can be seen. This suggests that it will be possible to use a wavefront shape analysis to get an additional handle on the atmospheric depth of the shower maximum, which is sensitive to the mass of the primary particle.

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“…The technique is attractive because it requires detectors which are relatively cheap and is not limited by a small duty cycle, unlike the fluorescence technique [2]. Several experimental initiatives such as AERA [3] and EASIER [4] in coincidence with the Pierre Auger Observatory [5], CODALEMA [6], LOPES [7], TREND [8], LOFAR [9] and Tunka-Rex [10], have been exploring emission from air showers mainly in the 30-80 MHz frequency range, studying the relation of the pulses to composition [11,12] and trying to understand the lateral distribution of the emission [13,14,3,9]. In addition the fortuitous detection of pulses from air showers with the ANITA balloon flown detector [15] has revealed that the pulses from these showers extend to the GHz regime, with more experimental evidence also obtained by the CROME experiment [16].…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Radio pulses from ultra-high energy atmospheric showers as the superposition of Askaryan and geomagnetic mechanisms

Álvarez-Muñiz

Carvalho

Schoorlemmer

et al. 2014

Astroparticle Physics

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Radio emission in atmospheric showers is currently interpreted in terms of radiation due to the deviation of the charged particles in the magnetic field of the Earth and to the charge excess (Askaryan effect). Each of these mechanisms has a distinctive polarization. The complex signal patterns can be qualitatively explained as the interference (superposition) of the fields induced by each mechanism. In this work we explicitly and quantitatively test a simple phenomenological model based on this idea. The model is constructed by isolating each of the two components at the simulation level and by making use of approximate symmetries for each of the contributions separately. The results of the model are then checked against full ZHAireS Monte Carlo simulations of the electric field calculated from first principles. We show that the simple model describes radio emission at a few percent level in a wide range of shower-observer geometries and on a shower-by-shower basis. As a consequence, this approach provides a simple method to reduce the computing time needed to accurately predict the electric field of radio pulses emitted from air showers, with many practical applications in experimental situations of interest.

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Radio Pulses from Extensive Air Showers

Cited by 29 publications

References 4 publications

Radio emission from cosmic ray air showers

Radio emission from cosmic ray air showers

The shape of the radio wavefront of extensive air showers as measured with LOFAR

Radio pulses from ultra-high energy atmospheric showers as the superposition of Askaryan and geomagnetic mechanisms

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