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

Abstract

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.

Replaced with revised version published in Astroparticle Physics

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Cited by in corpus (20)

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• Simulation of Radiation Energy Release in Air Showers
• NuRadioReco: A reconstruction framework for radio neutrino detectors
• A comprehensive analysis of anomalous ANITA events disfavors a diffuse tau-neutrino flux origin
• Determination of the absolute energy scale of extensive air showers via radio emission: systematic uncertainty of underlying first-principle calculations
• Prospects for High-Elevation Radio Detection of >100 PeV Tau Neutrinos
• An analytic description of the radio emission of air showers based on its emission mechanisms
• Analytic calculation of radio emission from parameterized extensive air showers, a tool to extract shower parameters
• Radio interferometry applied to the observation of cosmic-ray induced extensive air showers
• Self-triggered radio detection and identification of cosmic air showers with the OVRO-LWA
• Radiowave Detection of Ultra-High Energy Neutrinos and Cosmic Rays
• Calculations of low-frequency radio emission by cosmic ray-induced particle showers
• $X_{\text{max}}$ reconstruction from amplitude information with AERA
• Density and magnetic intensity dependence of radio pulses induced by energetic air showers
• Determination of cosmic-ray primary mass on an event-by-event basis using radio detection
• A proposed method for measurement of cosmic-ray chemical composition based on geomagnetic spectroscopy
• Proof of principle for template synthesis approach for the radio emission from vertical extensive air showers