Tunka-Rex: the Cost-Effective Radio Extension of the Tunka Air-Shower Observatory

Abstract

Tunka-Rex is the radio extension of the Tunka cosmic-ray observatory in Siberia close to Lake Baikal. Since October 2012 Tunka-Rex measures the radio signal of air-showers in coincidence with the non-imaging air-Cherenkov array Tunka-133. Furthermore, this year additional antennas will go into operation triggered by the new scintillator array Tunka-Grande measuring the secondary electrons and muons of air showers. Tunka-Rex is a demonstrator for how economic an antenna array can be without losing significant performance: we have decided for simple and robust SALLA antennas, and we share the existing DAQ running in slave mode with the PMT detectors and the scintillators, respectively. This means that Tunka-Rex is triggered externally, and does not need its own infrastructure and DAQ for hybrid measurements. By this, the performance and the added value of the supplementary radio measurements can be studied, in particular, the precision for the reconstructed energy and the shower maximum in the energy range of approximately $10^{17}-10^{18}$eV. Here we show first results on the energy reconstruction indicating that radio measurements can compete with air-Cherenkov measurements in precision. Moreover, we discuss future plans for Tunka-Rex.

Proceeding of UHECR 2014, Springdale, Utah, USA, accepted by JPS Conference Proceedings

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Cited by in corpus (1)

• Radio detection of cosmic ray air showers in the digital era