A comparison of the cosmic-ray energy scales of Tunka-133 and KASCADE-Grande via their radio extensions Tunka-Rex and LOPES

Abstract

The radio technique is a promising method for detection of cosmic-ray air showers of energies around $100$PeV and higher with an array of radio antennas. Since the amplitude of the radio signal can be measured absolutely and increases with the shower energy, radio measurements can be used to determine the air-shower energy on an absolute scale. We show that calibrated measurements of radio detectors operated in coincidence with host experiments measuring air showers based on other techniques can be used for comparing the energy scales of these host experiments. Using two approaches, first via direct amplitude measurements, and second via comparison of measurements with air shower simulations, we compare the energy scales of the air-shower experiments Tunka-133 and KASCADE-Grande, using their radio extensions, Tunka-Rex and LOPES, respectively. Due to the consistent amplitude calibration for Tunka-Rex and LOPES achieved by using the same reference source, this comparison reaches an accuracy of approximately $10\%$ - limited by some shortcomings of LOPES, which was a prototype experiment for the digital radio technique for air showers. In particular we show that the energy scales of cosmic-ray measurements by the independently calibrated experiments KASCADE-Grande and Tunka-133 are consistent with each other on this level.

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Cited by in corpus (15)

• Radio detection of Cosmic-Ray Air Showers and High-Energy Neutrinos
• The primary cosmic-ray energy spectrum measured with the Tunka-133 array
• Final results of the LOPES radio interferometer for cosmic-ray air showers
• High-Energy Galactic Cosmic Rays (Astro2020 Science White Paper)
• On the cosmic-ray energy scale of the LOFAR radio telescope
• Angular reconstruction of high energy air showers using the radio signal spectrum
• Reconstruction of sub-threshold events of cosmic-ray radio detectors using an autoencoder
• Tunka Advanced Instrument for cosmic rays and Gamma Astronomy
• Tunka-Rex Virtual Observatory
• Design and Expected Performance of the IceCube-Gen2 Surface Array and its Radio Component (ARENA2022)
• A Probabilistic Model for the Efficiency of Cosmic-Ray Radio Arrays
• Improved measurements of the energy and shower maximum of cosmic rays with Tunka-Rex
• Tunka-Rex: Status, Plans, and Recent Results (ARENA 2016)
• Status of air-shower measurements with sparse radio arrays (ARENA 2016)
• A Bayesian Method for Air-Shower Reconstruction using Information Field Theory