IFLP   13074
INSTITUTO DE FISICA LA PLATA
Unidad Ejecutora - UE
artículos
Título:
Energy estimation of cosmic rays with the Engineering Radio Array of the Pierre Auger Observatory
Autor/es:
THE PIERRE AUGER COLLABORATION (P HANSEN PERTENECE A LA COLABORACIÓN AUGER)
Revista:
PHYSICAL REVIEW D
Editorial:
AMER PHYSICAL SOC
Referencias:
Lugar: New York; Año: 2016 vol. 93 p. 1 - 10
ISSN:
1550-7998
Resumen:
The Auger Engineering Radio Array (AERA) is part of the Pierre Auger Observatory and is used todetect the radio emission of cosmic-ray air showers. These observations are compared to the data of thesurface detector stations of the Observatory, which provide well-calibrated information on the cosmic-rayenergies and arrival directions. The response of the radio stations in the 30?80 MHz regime has beenthoroughly calibrated to enable the reconstruction of the incoming electric field. For the latter, the energydeposit per area is determined from the radio pulses at each observer position and is interpolated using atwo-dimensional function that takes into account signal asymmetries due to interference between thegeomagnetic and charge-excess emission components. The spatial integral over the signal distribution givesa direct measurement of the energy transferred from the primary cosmic ray into radio emission in theAERA frequency range. We measure 15.8 MeV of radiation energy for a 1 EeV air shower arrivingperpendicularly to the geomagnetic field. This radiation energy?corrected for geometrical effects?is usedas a cosmic-ray energy estimator. Performing an absolute energy calibration against the surface-detectorinformation, we observe that this radio-energy estimator scales quadratically with the cosmic-ray energy asexpected for coherent emission. We find an energy resolution of the radio reconstruction of 22% for thedata set and 17% for a high-quality subset containing only events with at least five radio stations withsignal.