Results and Perspectives of the Auger Engineering Radio Array

TL;DR

The paper discusses the deployment, technological advancements, and experimental results of the Auger Engineering Radio Array (AERA), which detects radio emissions from high-energy cosmic-ray air showers to improve energy calibration.

Contribution

It presents the latest developments and measurements of radio emission energy from air showers, enhancing calibration methods for cosmic-ray energy scales.

Findings

Measurement of radio emission energy correlates with cosmic-ray energy.

Cross-calibration with Auger surface detector improves accuracy.

AERA's technological innovations enable better understanding of air showers.

Abstract

The Auger Engineering Radio Array (AERA) is an extension of the Pierre Auger Cosmic-Ray Observatory. It is used to detect radio emission from extensive air showers with energies beyond $10^{17}~$eV in the $30 - 80~$MHz frequency band. After three phases of deployment, AERA now consists of more than 150 autonomous radio stations with different spacings, covering an area of about $17~$km$^2$. It is located at the same site as other Auger low-energy detector extensions enabling combinations with various other measurement techniques. The radio array allows different technical schemes to be explored as well as cross-calibration of our measurements with the established baseline detectors of the Auger Observatory. We report on the most recent technological developments and give an overview of the experimental results obtained with AERA. In particular, we will present the measurement of the radiation energy, i.e., the amount of energy that is emitted by the air shower in the form of radio emission, and its dependence on the cosmic-ray energy by comparing with the measurement of the the well-calibrated Auger surface detector. Furthermore, we outline the relevance of this result for the absolute calibration of the energy scale of cosmic-ray observatories.