Atmospheric multiple scattering of fluorescence light from extensive air showers and effect of the aerosol size on the reconstruction of energy and depth of maximum

Abstract

The reconstruction of the energy and the depth of maximum $X_{\max }$ of an extensive air shower depends on the multiple scattering of fluorescence photons in the atmosphere. In this work, we explain how atmospheric aerosols, and especially their size, scatter the fluorescence photons during their propagation. Using a Monte Carlo simulation for the scattering of light, the dependence on the aerosol conditions of the multiple scattered light contribution to the recorded signal is fully parameterised. A clear dependence on the aerosol size is proposed for the first time. Finally, using this new parameterisation, the effect of atmospheric aerosols on the energy and on the $X_{\max }$ reconstructions is presented for a vertical extensive air shower observed by a ground-based detector at $30$km: for typical aerosol conditions, multiple scattering leads to a systematic over-estimation of $5\pm 1.5\%$ for the energy and $4.0\pm 1.5$g/cm${}^2$ for the $X_{\max }$, where the uncertainties refer to a variation of the aerosol size.

12 pages, 9 figures, journal paper, accepted in Astroparticle Physics. arXiv admin note: text overlap with arXiv:1310.1702

References in corpus (6)

• Measurement of the Aerosol Phase Function at the Pierre Auger Observatory
• Monte Carlo simulation of light scattering in the atmosphere and effect of atmospheric aerosols on the point spread function
• Atmospheric multiple scattering of fluorescence and Cherenkov light emitted by extensive air showers
• Ramsauer approach for light scattering on non-absorbing spherical particles and application to the Henyey-Greenstein phase function
• Ramsauer approach to Mie scattering of light on spherical particles
• Point spread function due to multiple scattering of light in the atmosphere

Cited by in corpus (3)

• Depth of Maximum of Air-Shower Profiles at the Pierre Auger Observatory: Measurements at Energies above 10^17.8 eV
• Studies of an air-shower imaging system for the detection of ultrahigh-energy neutrinos
• Atmospheric effects in astroparticle physics experiments and the challenge of ever greater precision in measurements