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.
Highlights
Cosmic rays are charged, high-energy particles from space which offer a window to the most energetic processes in the universe
The Tunka-133 calibration is based on the QUEST experiment which measured air-Cherenkov light of air showers coincidentally with the particle-detector array EAS-TOP [25,26], which itself was calibrated with CORSIKA simulations using different hadronic interaction models, among them QGSJET [27,28]
Another slight advantage of Tunka-Rex is that Tunka-133 provides a measurement of the depth of shower maximum, which has been used to select simulations whose depth of shower maximum is consistent within 30 g/cm2 to the measured one
Summary
High-energy particles from space which offer a window to the most energetic processes in the universe. Particle detector arrays measuring the secondary particles at the observation level can be operated around-the-clock, and offer the highest exposure and best event statistics They are limited by systematic uncertainties from air-shower simulations based on hadronic interaction models beyond the energy range probed by accelerators, which are required for proper interpretation of the data. Optical techniques, detecting the air-Cherenkov or fluorescence light of the electromagnetic air-shower component suffer less from systematic uncertainties of air-shower simulations, but can only operate during clear and dark nights, reducing the statistics by an order of magnitude To overcome these problems, contemporary observatories combine advantages from the different observation techniques in hybrid detectors [4,5]. This analysis sheds light on the systematic effects originating from the independent energy calibrations of both experiments and facilitates a combined interpretation of data from both experiments
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