Göttingen 2012 – scientific programme
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T: Fachverband Teilchenphysik
T 104: Kosmische Strahlung 6
T 104.7: Talk
Friday, March 2, 2012, 10:00–10:15, ZHG 006
A new formalism for the calculation of electromagnetic radiation — •Clancy James1, Heino Falcke2,3, Tim Huege1,4, and Marianne Ludwig4 — 1ECAP, University of Erlangen-Nürnberg, Erlangen, Germany — 2Department of Astrophysics, Radboud University Nijmegen, The Netherlands — 3ASTRON, Dwingeloo, the Netherlands — 4Karlsruher Institut für Technologie, Karlsruhe, Germany
We present the ’endpoint’ formalism, a completely general method to calculate the electromagnetic radiation resulting from charged particle acceleration. We derive the formalism, and show how it accurately reproduces classical processes such as transition and synchrotron radiation. The formalism is ideally suited to the calculation of coherent fields from complex systems where analytic methods break down, such as cascades resulting from the interactions of high-energy particles. These cascades emit coherent radio-wave radiation, as predicted by Askaryan in 1962, and demonstrated for dense media at SLAC in 2004. An implementation of the endpoint formalism has been used in the REAS3 code to calculate the emission from atmospheric air showers - this is described in another contribution. Here, we focus on the case of dense media, and use the endpoint formalism to show that Askaryan’s radiation is dominated by coherent bremsstrahlung, rather than coherent Vavilov-Cherenkov radiation as was previously thought. We conclude by noting that ground-based radio-telescopes will thus be able to detect ultra-high-energy cosmic-ray interactions in the outer layers of the Moon.