Speaker
Frank Schröder
(Karlsruhe Institute of Technology (KIT))
Description
LOPES is a digital antenna array at the Karlsruhe Institute of Technology, Germany, for cosmic-ray air-shower measurements. Triggered by the co-located KASCADE-Grande air-shower array, LOPES detects the radio emission of air showers via digital radio interferometry. We will summarize the status of LOPES and recent results concerning the understanding of the radio emission and the reconstruction of air-shower properties from the radio signal. We will present an update of results on the successful reconstruction of energy and arrival direction of the primary particles. Even more important for many particle and astrophysics questions is the reconstruction of the atmospheric depth of the shower maximum, Xmax, which yields information on the type of the primary particle and its interaction with the atmosphere. We found experimental evidence that radio measurements are indeed sensitive to the longitudinal development of air showers, since we observe a correlation between the slope of radio-lateral distributions and measurements of the muon-tracking detector of KASCADE-Grande. Moreover, since recently improved REAS simulations come close to the measurements, they are used as input for the reconstruction of Xmax. Unfortunately, at LOPES, the Xmax precision is limited by the high level of anthropogenic radio background, but the developed methods can be
transferred to next generation experiments with lower background.
Author
Frank Schröder
(Karlsruhe Institute of Technology (KIT))
Co-author
- LOPES Collaboration
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