Radio Emission from Cosmic Ray Air Showers: Coherent Geosynchrotron Radiation
Tim Huege (MPIfR Bonn), Heino Falcke (MPIfR Bonn/ASTRON/University of, Nijmegen)

TL;DR
This paper models radio emission from cosmic ray air showers as coherent geosynchrotron radiation, explaining spectral and spatial features and aligning with experimental observations, aiding future radio detection efforts.
Contribution
It introduces a new model interpreting radio emission as coherent geosynchrotron radiation, incorporating realistic shower geometries to explain observed spectral and spatial characteristics.
Findings
Model reproduces qualitative emission spectrum trends
Radial dependence governed by synchrotron beaming and shower superposition
Consistent with experimental emission levels within systematic errors
Abstract
Cosmic ray air showers have been known for over 30 years to emit pulsed radio emission in the frequency range from a few to a few hundred MHz, an effect that offers great opportunities for the study of extensive air showers with upcoming fully digital "software radio telescopes" such as LOFAR and the enhancement of particle detector arrays such as KASCADE Grande or the Pierre Auger Observatory. However, there are still a lot of open questions regarding the strength of the emission as well as the underlying emission mechanism. Accompanying the development of a LOFAR prototype station dedicated to the observation of radio emission from extensive air showers, LOPES, we therefore take a new approach to modeling the emission process, interpreting it as "coherent geosynchrotron emission" from electron-positron pairs gyrating in the earth's magnetic field. We develop our model in a…
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Taxonomy
TopicsAstrophysics and Cosmic Phenomena · Particle Accelerators and Free-Electron Lasers · Particle accelerators and beam dynamics
