The history of acoustic neutrino detection will be reviewed.
ANTARES, the largest underwater neutrino telescope in the Northern Hemisphere, has been continuously operating since 2007 in the Mediterranean Sea. It consists of an array of vertical lines, hosting triplets of optical modules that detect the Cherenkov light emitted by charged particles originating from neutrino interactions in and around the detector. The transparency of the water allows for...
The Giant Radio Array for Neutrino Detection (GRAND) aims to answer one of the most pressing open questions in astrophysics: what is the origin of ultra-high-energy cosmic rays (UHECRs)?
It will do so indirectly: UHECRs make secondary UHE neutrinos which encode information about the properties of UHECRs and their sources. GRAND is designed to discover UHE neutrinos even under pessimistic...
A surface array of radio antennas at the location of the IceTop particle-detector array will enable a number of science cases complementary to the current goals of IceCube. First, the accuracy for cosmic-ray air showers will be increased, since the radio array provides a calorimetric measurement of the electromagnetic component and is sensitive to the position of the shower maximum. This...
We give an update on the mass composition of cosmic rays between 10$^{17}$ and 10$^{17.5}$ eV measured by the LOFAR radio telescope. By matching observations with two-dimensional radio intensity footprints simulated with Corsika/CoREAS we reconstruct X_max with a resolution of $\sim$20 g/cm$^2$.
We present improvements that were introduced in the reconstruction pipeline and their implications...
The Pierre Auger Observatory is the largest observatory for the detection of cosmic rays. With the Auger Engineering Radio Array (AERA) we measure the emitted radio signal of extensive air showers and reconstruct properties of the primary cosmic rays. For horizontal air showers (zenith angles larger than 60°) the signal is distributed over a larger area of more than several km². Therefore...
The Auger Engineering Radio Array (AERA) is a radio detector at the Pierre Auger Observatory and it is dedicated to measure the radio emission of cosmic-ray air showers. AERA is co-located with the underground muon detectors of the Auger Muons and Infill for the Ground Array (AMIGA). This provides a perfect setup to experimentally test the benefits of combining muons and radio emission for...
The mass composition of ultra-high-energy cosmic rays is an important key for answering questions about the origin of these rare particles. A composition-sensitive parameter is the atmospheric depth $X_{max}$ at which the maximum number of particles in the air shower is reached.
The Auger Engineering Radio Array (AERA) detects the radio emission from extensive air showers with energies...
The ARIANNA experiment aims to detect the radio signals of cosmogenic neutrinos. It is running in its pilot phase on the Ross Ice-shelf, and one station has been installed at South Pole. The ARIANNA concept is based on installing high-gain log periodic dipole antennas close to the surface monitoring the underlying ice for the radio signals following a neutrino interaction. Especially, but not...
The Auger Engineering Radio Array (AERA) located at the Pierre Auger Observatory in Mendoza, Argentina, measures the radio emission of extensive air-showers initiated by cosmic rays with energies above 0.1 EeV. More than 150 autonomous antenna stations, spread over 17 km² measure radio signals in the frequency range of 30 – 80 MHz. The operation of AERA within the Pierre Auger Observatory...
The Antarctic Impulsive Transient Antenna (ANITA) payload has now completed four flights. ANITA is sensitive to impulsive Askaryan radio emission from neutrino-initiated showers in the Antarctic ice sheet, and also to geomagnetically-induced radio emission from extensive air showers (EAS) initiated by cosmic rays or upward-going tau leptons that could be created by tau neutrino interactions...
The South Pole is an excellent location for a radio neutrino detector, with exceptional quality of ice and significant existing South Pole station and IceCube infrastructure. The Askaryan Radio Array (ARA) at the South Pole has successfully deployed two more stations, one of them with a phased array string, in the 2017–2018 austral summer season.
I will discuss some design changes and...
poster:
Our understanding of radio detection of cosmic rays has been greatly improved over the last years. Extensive air showers are now routinely measured with experiments like Tunka-Rex, the LOFAR radio telescope, or the to date biggest radio detector for cosmic rays, the 17 km$^2$ Auger Engineering Radio Array (AERA) at the Pierre Auger Observatory. The properties of the incoming cosmic...
The origin and properties of Ultra High Energy Cosmic Rays (UHECR) is a long standing question in astroparticle Physics. Dedicated extensive air shower experiments are in place since many years and have strongly contributed to our understanding of High and Ultra High Energy Cosmic Ray Physics. Recently, in particular, the Pierre Auger Collaboration and the Telescope Array Collaboration, thanks...
The spatial signal distribution of the radio frequency radiation from extensive air showers on the ground contains information on crucial cosmic-ray properties, such as energy and mass. A long standing challenge to access this information experimentally with a sparse grid of antennas is an analytic modeling of the radio signal distribution, which will be addressed in this contribution. We...
Propagation of radio emission through surfaces or media with inhomogeneous properties is usually simulated by means of ray-tracing. It is however possible that there are cases where it more suitable to treat the radiation as waves. We use a Finite-Difference Time-Domain (FDTD) code to simulate the propagation of radio emission through ice, with a particular focus on the role of an...
Experiments for radio detection of UHE particles such as e.g. ARA/ARIANNA or
NuMoon require detailed understanding of the propagation of radio waves in the
surrounding matter. The index of refraction in e.g. polar ice or lunar rock may
have a complex spatial structure that makes detailed simulations of the radio
propagation necessary to design the respective experiments and analyse their
data....
The radio intensity and polarization footprint of a cosmic-ray induced extensive air shower is determined by the time-dependent structure of the charge and current distribution residing in the plasma cloud at the shower front. For extracting physics, such as cosmic ray mass or atmospheric electric fields, it is important to determine this charge-current distribution in the plasma cloud, the...
The detection of air-shower events via radio signals requires to develop a trigger algorithm for a clean discrimination between signal and background events in order to reduce the data stream coming from false triggers.
In this contribution we will describe an approach to trigger air-shower events on a single-antenna level as well as performing an online reconstruction of the shower parameters...
Introduction. Proton range verification by ion-acoustic wave sensing is a technique under development for applications in hadron therapy as an alternative to nuclear imaging. It provides an acoustic imaging of the proton energy deposition vs. depth using the acoustic wave Time of Flight (TOF). State-of-the-art (based on simulations and experimental results) points out as this detection...
When discussing radio emission from cosmic ray air showers we commonly make a number of assumptions regarding the production and propagation physics. Incorporating all of these it should be possible to construct a forward model to predict the radio signal produced by an air shower from simple parameters, an application and generalisation of shower universality to radio emission.
In terms of...
The energy of extensive air showers can be determined with the energy radiated in the form of radio signals. The so called radiation energy can be predicted with modern simulation codes using first-principle calculations without the need of free parameters. Here, we verify the consistency of the radiation energy calculations by comparing a large set of Monte Carlo simulations made with the two...
We present measurements of radio emission from extensive air showers during thunderstorm conditions. Both intensity and polarization signatures of these events are very different from those measured during fair weather. The reason for this difference is due to the action of the atmospheric electric field. We have developed a procedure to extract from the radio footprint in intensity and...
poster:
A new function is addressed to describe the radio footprint of air showers using physical reasoning. The air shower induced by a cosmic-ray primary particle emits radio emission due to the Geomagnetic effect and the Askaryan effect. The function describes these two mechanisms separately. CoREAS simulations of LOFAR events are used to parameterize the function in order describe as a...
First ideas to use thermoacoustic phenomena for particle detection date back to the fifties. The technique has intensely been considered for underwater ultra-high neutrino detectors [1] and appropriate detector arrays are under development [2]. There have been also attempts to use the acoustic signal induced by the characteristic dose deposition of a proton pulse in context of radiation...
The ARIANNA detector aims to detect neutrinos with energies above $10^{16}$ eV by instrumenting 0.5 Teratons of ice with a surface array of a thousand independent radio detector stations in Antarctica. The Antarctic ice is transparent to the radio signals caused by the Askaryan effect which allows for a cost-effective instrumentation of large volumes. Several pilot stations are currently...
The Askaryan Radio Array (ARA) is an experiment looking for the Askaryan emission of GZK neutrinos interacting in the Antarctic ice. During the last Antarctic summer, two new stations have been added the experiment, as well as a prototype version of the phased array, attached to one of the new stations. With these stations, ARA sensitivity should become comparable to IceCube's. To confirm...
Askaryan Radio Array (ARA) is being built at the South Pole aiming for observing high energy cosmogenic neutrinos above 50 PeV. The ARA detector identifies the radio emissions from the excess charge in a particle shower induced by a neutrino interaction. Such a radio emission was first predicted by Askaryan in 1962 and experimentally confirmed by Saltzberg et al. using the SLAC accelerator in...
Reconstruction of potential ultra-high-energy (UHE) neutrino events at the Askaryan Radio Array (ARA) is complicated by the variable index of refraction of South Pole ice, leading to curved radio signal paths from the interaction vertex. We solve this computational challenge by using a multi-step spline table framework that provides information about the “firn shadow” region along with both...
Radio emission of extensive air showers is used to reconstruct prop-
erties of the ultra-high energy cosmic rays. With an area of 17 km$^2$, the Auger Radio Engineering Array has recorded a sizable number of cosmic rays with energies exceeding 1 EeV. Especially interesting are measurements of air showers
at large zenith angles because these induce sizable footprints recorded in
many radio...
poster:
The LOw Frequency ARay (LOFAR) is a multipurpose radio antenna array aimed to detect radio signals in the frequency range 10-240 MHz, covering a large surface in Northern Europe with a higher density in the Netherlands. Analytical calculations and simulation studies performed in the 2000s indicates a dependence of the radio frequency spectrum on cosmic-ray air shower characteristics....
The SLAC T-510 experiment measured radio emission from particle cascades in a controlled laboratory setting. An electron beam incident upon a dense dielectric target produced a particle cascade in the presence of a strong magnetic field. The goal of the experiment was to compare controlled laboratory measurements of radio emission to predictions using particle-level simulations. We...
In this work, we present a compact transmitter array with three elements based on the parametric acoustic sources effect able to reproduce the acoustic signature of an Ultra-High Energy neutrino interaction in water. We also propose to use directive transducers using the parametric technique for the characterization of piezo-ceramic sensors contained in the KM3NeT DOMs. This technique can...
The AMADEUS system was a submarine acoustic array operating from 2008 until 2015 as a part of the ANTARES neutrino telescope in the Mediterranean Sea. Its design goal was to investigate the feasibility of acoustic neutrino detection in the deep sea. The data taken during its eight years of operation provide a wealth of information for setting up realistic simulations of future acoustic...
Introduction. Hadron therapy is an extremely interesting option for cancer treatment, comparing with photon-based radio-therapy. The ion beam deposits very low energy at the interface, practically no dose after the tumor and releases a specific energy peak inside the tissues. This peak is called Bragg Peak and its shaping is also very sharp, increasing this way the dose deposited in depth....
Radio detection of air showers in the current era has progressed immensely to effectively extract the information of air showers and their properties. It is mainly applied to the detection of cosmic rays and neutrinos. Primary cosmic rays with energies of hundreds of PeV have been successfully measured with the method of radio detection. Current radio experiments measuring such air showers...
poster:
When a cosmic ray interacts with the Earth's atmosphere, it produces a cascade of secondary particles, known as Extensive Air Showers (EAS). Associated with the cascade, a radio signal is emitted through Geomagnetic and Askaryan mechanisms, which can be used for reconstructing the properties of the primary particle.
The LOw Frequency ARay (LOFAR) observatory is a multipurpose radio...
The LOFAR radio telescope measures radio emission from air showers in
great detail. Now, we seek to extend our data taking capabilities.
In this contribution we discuss the expansion of the LOFAR Radboud Air
Shower Array (LORA). LORA is a particle detector array located at the
dense LOFAR core and is used to trigger the read-out of the LOFAR
antennas. By doubling the size of the array, we...
Cosmic neutrinos are expected to include a significant flux of tau neutrinos due to flavor mixing over astronomical length scales. However, the tau-neutrino content of astrophysical neutrinos is poorly constrained and a significant flux of cosmogenic tau neutrinos awaits discovery. Earth-skimming tau neutrinos undergo charged-current interactions that result in a tau lepton exiting the Earth....
Water and ice are the favourite targets for the deployment of acoustic sensors in the search for the characteristic bipolar pressure pulses (BIP) induced by cascades following interaction of very high energy neutrinos with matter. Apparently, there were no previous attempts to try it in bedrock. The reasons are obvious. The costs of deploying a line with sensors into deep sea are considerably...
The steep decrease of the flux of ultra-high energy cosmic rays (UHECR)
provides a challenge to answer the long standing question about their origin
and nature. A significant increase in detector volume may be achieved by
employing Earth's moon as detector that is read out using exisiting Earth-bound
radio telescopes by searching for the radio pulses emitted by the particle
shower in the...
The Murchison Widefield Array (MWA) is a low-frequency (70-300 MHz) aperture-array radio telescope that has the potential to study geomagnetic radio emission from cosmic-ray air showers commensally with its regular astronomical observations. This mode of operation has proven highly effective with the LOFAR telescope, and its implementation with the MWA is a vital step towards its future use...
