David ButlerKarlsruhe |
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Tomography of radio emission from cosmic ray air showers using an information field theory approach(pdf)
The radio detection method for cosmic rays relies on coherent emission from electrons and positrons which is beamed in a narrow cone along the direction of the primary particle. Currently the only models to reproduce this emission with sufficient accuracy are Monte Carlo based simulations of the particle microphysics, which require large investments of computation time. Even then the final analysis relies on simple metrics and empirically determined correlations to retrieve quantities of interest. With Bayesian statistics it is possible to "learn" relevant properties of existing simulations and recycle them, with massive savings potential in end user computation costs. Going further one could use this knowledge to perform a tomographic reconstruction of the air shower, i.e. infer its development history only from ground-based measurements. This would open new avenues beyond the standard Xmax reconstruction, allowing more detailed analysis of individual air showers.