Abstract
A simulation study of the energy released by extensive air showers in the form of MHz radiation is performed using the CoREAS simulation code. We develop an efficient method to extract this radiation energy from air-shower simulations. We determine the longitudinal profile of the radiation energy release and compare it to the longitudinal profile of the energy deposit by the electromagnetic component of the air shower. We find that the radiation energy corrected for the geometric dependence of the geomagnetic emission scales quadratically with the energy in the electromagnetic component of the air shower with a second-order dependence on the atmospheric density at the position of the maximum shower development Xmax. In a measurement where Xmax is not accessible, this second order dependence can be approximated using the zenith angle of the incoming direction of the air shower with only a minor loss in accuracy. Our method results in an intrinsic uncertainty of 4% in the determination of the energy in the electromagnetic air-shower component, which is well below current experimental uncertainties.
Highlights
The measurement of high-energy cosmic rays using short radio pulses emitted by air showers is a quickly evolving field of research [1]
We study the emission of the radiation energy from the theoretical side using Monte Carlo simulations of air showers and the calculation of the radiation from first-principles based on classical electrodynamics
We compared the profile of the radiation energy release with the longitudinal profile of the energy deposit of the air shower and found that the radio profile is shifted to smaller atmospheric depths with respect to the dE/dX profile with an average shift of 46 g/cm2
Summary
The measurement of high-energy cosmic rays using short radio pulses emitted by air showers is a quickly evolving field of research [1]. A new method to measure the cosmic-ray energy using the radiation energy, i.e., the energy that is emitted by the air shower within the frequency band of the detector, was presented [2,3,4,5]. We study the emission of the radiation energy from the theoretical side using Monte Carlo simulations of air showers and the calculation of the radiation from first-principles based on classical electrodynamics. More details of this analysis can be found in [6]
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