First Air-Shower Measurements with the Prototype Station of the IceCube Surface Enhancement

TL;DR

This paper reports the first measurements of cosmic-ray air showers using a prototype station with scintillators and antennas at IceTop, demonstrating the combined detection capabilities and potential improvements for cosmic-ray studies.

Contribution

It introduces a new prototype station with scintillators and antennas at IceTop, showing initial measurements and the integration of multiple detector types for enhanced cosmic-ray observation.

Findings

First cosmic-ray air showers measured with the prototype station

Successful integration of scintillators and radio antennas for air-shower detection

Complementary observations from different detector types demonstrated

Abstract

IceTop, the surface array of the IceCube Neutrino Observatory, consists of 162 ice-Cherenkov tanks distributed over an area of 1km$^2$. Besides being used as a veto for the in-ice neutrino detector, IceTop is a powerful cosmic-ray detector. In the upcoming years, the capabilities of the IceTop array will be enhanced by augmenting the existing ice-Cherenkov tanks with an array of elevated scintillator panels and radio antennas. Combining the data obtained from the different detectors will improve the reconstruction of cosmic-ray energy and primary mass while reducing the energy threshold and increasing the aperture of the array. In January 2020, a prototype station consisting of 8 scintillation detectors and 3 antennas was deployed at the IceTop site. The prototype detectors are connected to one data-acquisition system and the readout of the radio antennas is triggered using the signals from the scintillators. This allows us to regularly observe secondary air shower particles hitting the scintillators, as well as the radio emission of high-energy air showers. In this contribution, we will discuss the results obtained from the prototype station in the past year, present the first cosmic-ray air showers measured with this prototype station, and show how the observations with the different detector types complement each other.