End-to-end reconstruction of ultra-high energy particle observables from radio detection of extensive air showers

TL;DR

This paper presents a new end-to-end method for reconstructing ultra-high-energy cosmic ray and neutrino properties from radio signals of inclined air showers, achieving high accuracy and resolution.

Contribution

It introduces an analytical least-squares electric field reconstruction and a spherical wave model with ADF for precise primary particle property estimation.

Findings

Electric field reconstruction bias is negligible with a 0.04 standard deviation.

Achieved 0.04° angular resolution for arrival directions.

Energy estimation has a 10% resolution after corrections.

Abstract

The radio detection of very inclined air showers offers a promising avenue for studying ultra-high-energy cosmic rays (UHECRs) and neutrinos. Accurate reconstruction methods are essential for investigating the properties of primary particles. Recently, we developed an analytical least-squares method to reconstruct the electric field using three polarization components. The reconstruction yields no bias, with a 68\% confidence interval of [-0.02, 0.02], and a standard deviation of 0.04. Using this reconstructed electric field, we perform a realistic reconstruction of the the properties of primary particles. We employ a spherical wave model combined with an angular distribution function (ADF) for arrival direction reconstruction, achieving an angular resolution of 0.04$^\circ$. This paper also presents an energy reconstruction in which we account for the effects of geosynchrotron radiation in inclined air showers, we implement an air density correction in the energy reconstruction, resulting in a 10\% resolution in energy estimation. These findings demonstrate the reliability and effectiveness of our reconstruction methodology, paving the way for future detection experiments using sparse antenna arrays.