Towards a fast and precise forward model for air shower radio simulation

TL;DR

This paper introduces a semi-analytical model for air shower radio emission that significantly reduces computation time while maintaining accuracy, enhancing the efficiency of cosmic ray detection methods.

Contribution

It presents a novel semi-analytical framework that maps template simulations to radio event specifications, enabling faster and more direct modeling of air shower radio signals.

Findings

Model reduces simulation time compared to Monte Carlo methods.

Allows direct input of shower maximum depth in simulations.

Potential to improve air shower reconstruction accuracy.

Abstract

The radio detection method for cosmic rays relies on coherent emission from electrons and positrons which is beamed in a narrow cone along the shower axis. Currently the only mod- els to reproduce this emission with sufficient accuracy are Monte Carlo based simulations of the particle and radio emission physics, which require large investments of computation time. The work presented here focuses on condensing the simulation results into a semi-analytical model. This relies on building a framework based on theoretical predictions of radio emission, but instead of calculating the radio signal directly these models are used to map template simu- lations to the specifications of a given radio event. Our current approach slices the radio signal based on atmospheric depth of origin and weights these slices based on a shower parameter such as electron number or an effective dipole moment. One significant gain over the existing Monte Carlo codes lies in the fact this makes the depth of the shower maximum a direct input to the simulation where currently one has to pre-select showers based on their random number seed. Such a model has great potential for heavily simulation-based analysis methods, for example the LOFAR air shower reconstruction. These techniques are severely limited by the available computation time but have the lowest errors in real measurement applications.