Search for cosmic rays in GRANDProto300

TL;DR

GRANDProto300 aims to validate autonomous radio detection of cosmic rays in the 10^17 to 10^18.5 eV range, with initial data analysis identifying candidate events and establishing a detection pipeline.

Contribution

This paper introduces a new cosmic-ray detection pipeline for GRANDProto300 and reports initial candidate events from early data collection.

Findings

Detection pipeline successfully filters cosmic-ray candidates

46 antennas operational, data collection ongoing

Initial candidate events identified

Abstract

GRANDProto300 (GP300) is a prototype array of the GRAND experiment, designed to validate the technique of autonomous radio-detection of astroparticles by detecting cosmic rays with energies between 10$^{17}$-10$^{18.5}$ eV. This observation will further enable the study of the Galactic-to-extragalactic source transition region. Between November 2024 u to May 2025, 46 out of 300 antennas have been operational and collecting data stably. We present here our cosmic-ray search pipeline, which involves several filtering steps: (1) coincidence search for signals triggering multiple antennas within a time window, (2) directional reconstruction of events, (3) exclusion of clustered (in time and space) noise events, (4) polarization cut, (5) selection based on the size of the footprint, and (6) other less mature cuts in this preliminary stage, including visual cuts. The efficiency of the pipeline is evaluated and applied to the first batch of data, yielding a set of cosmic-ray candidate events, which we present.