Cosmic Ray Measurements with LOPES: Status and Recent Results (ARENA 2012)

TL;DR

LOPES is a digital radio array that measures cosmic-ray air showers, providing key data on arrival directions, energy, and shower development, with ongoing improvements and potential for future high-precision measurements.

Contribution

This paper updates the status of LOPES and demonstrates its capability to reconstruct primary cosmic-ray properties, highlighting the potential for next-generation experiments.

Findings

Arrival direction reconstructed with at least 0.65° precision

Energy reconstructed with at least 20% precision

Radio lateral distribution slope sensitive to shower development

Abstract

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 summarize the status of LOPES and recent results. In particular, we present an update on the reconstruction of the primary-particle properties based on almost 500 events above 100 PeV. With LOPES, the arrival direction can be reconstructed with a precision of at least 0.65{\deg}, and the energy with a precision of at least 20 %, which, however, does not include systematic uncertainties on the absolute energy scale. For many particle and astrophysics questions the reconstruction of the atmospheric depth of the shower maximum, Xmax, is important, since it yields information on the type of the primary particle and its interaction with the atmosphere. Recently, we found experimental evidence that the slope of the radio lateral distribution is indeed sensitive to the longitudinal development of the air shower, but unfortunately, the Xmax precision at LOPES is limited by the high level of anthropogenic radio background. Nevertheless, the developed methods can be transferred to next generation experiments with lower background, which should provide an Xmax precision competitive to other detection technologies.