Reconstructing air shower parameters with MGMR3D

Mitra P, Scholten O, Trinh TN, Buitink S, Bhavani J, Corstanje A, Desmet M, Falcke H, Hare BM, Hörandel JR, Huege T, Karastathis N, Krampah GK, Mulrey K, Nelles A, Pandya H, Thoudam S, De Vries KD, Ter Veen S (2023)

Publication Type: Journal article

Publication year: 2023

Journal

Physical Review D American Physical Society

Book Volume: 108

Article Number: 083041

Journal Issue: 8

DOI: 10.1103/PhysRevD.108.083041

Abstract

Measuring the radio emission from cosmic-ray particle cascades has proven to be a very efficient method to determine their properties such as the mass composition. Efficient modeling of the radio emission from air showers is crucial in order to extract the cosmic-ray physics parameters from the measured radio emission. MGMR3D is a fast semianalytic code that calculates the complete radio footprint, i.e., intensity, polarization, and pulse shapes, for a parametrized shower-current density and can be used in a chi-square optimization to fit a given radio data. It is many orders of magnitude faster than its Monte Carlo counterparts. We provide a detailed comparative study of MGMR3D to Monte Carlo simulations, where, with improved parametrizations, the shower maximum Xmax is found to have very strong agreement with a small dependency on the incoming zenith angle of the shower. Another interesting feature we observe with MGMR3D is sensitivity to the shape of the longitudinal profile in addition to Xmax. This is achieved by probing the distinguishable radio footprint produced by a shower having a different longitudinal profile than usual. Furthermore, for the first time, we show the results of reconstructing shower parameters for Low-Frequency Array data using MGMR3D, and obtaining a Xmax resolution of 22 g/cm2 and energy resolution of 19%.

Involved external institutions

Khalifa University of Science, Technology & Research (KUSTAR) / جامعة خليفة AE United Arab Emirates (AE) Vrije Universiteit Brussel (VUB) BE Belgium (BE) Astron NL Netherlands (NL) Deutsches Elektronen-Synchrotron DESY DE Germany (DE) Karlsruhe Institute of Technology (KIT) DE Germany (DE) University of Warsaw / Uniwersytet Warszawski PL Poland (PL) Kapteyn Astronomical Institute NL Netherlands (NL) Can Tho University / Trường Đại học Cần Thơ VN Viet Nam (VN) Radboud University Nijmegen NL Netherlands (NL)

How to cite

APA:

Mitra, P., Scholten, O., Trinh, T.N., Buitink, S., Bhavani, J., Corstanje, A.,... Ter Veen, S. (2023). Reconstructing air shower parameters with MGMR3D. Physical Review D, 108(8). https://dx.doi.org/10.1103/PhysRevD.108.083041

MLA:

Mitra, P., et al. "Reconstructing air shower parameters with MGMR3D." Physical Review D 108.8 (2023).

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