Dethinning Extensive Air Shower Simulations

TL;DR

This paper introduces a dethinning method to reconstruct detailed particle information from thinned extensive air shower simulations, enabling large-scale studies without excessive computational costs.

Contribution

The paper presents a novel dethinning technique that converts weighted particles into realistic particle swarms, closely approximating non-thinned simulations.

Findings

Dethinning effectively reproduces non-thinned shower characteristics.

The method allows large-scale simulations with reduced computational resources.

Comparisons show high similarity between dethinned and non-thinned showers.

Abstract

We describe a method for restoring information lost during statistical thinning in extensive air shower simulations. By converting weighted particles from thinned simulations to swarms of particles with similar characteristics, we obtain a result that is essentially identical to the thinned shower, and which is very similar to non-thinned simulations of showers. We call this method dethinning. Using non-thinned showers on a large scale is impossible because of unrealistic CPU time requirements, but with thinned showers that have been dethinned, it is possible to carry out large-scale simulation studies of the detector response for ultra-high energy cosmic ray surface arrays. The dethinning method is described in detail and comparisons are presented with parent thinned showers and with non-thinned showers.