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T: Fachverband Teilchenphysik

T 76: Kosmische Strahlung 3

T 76.6: Talk

Wednesday, March 26, 2014, 18:10–18:25, P5

News on Auger Radio - Investigation of air shower parameters with the Auger Engineering Radio Array (AERA) — •Johannes Schulz for the Pierre Auger collaboration — IMAPP, Department of Astrophysics, Radboud University Nijmegen, Netherlands

The Pierre Auger Observatory in Argentina is the world's largest cosmic ray detector. It comprises two well established tools for detection: water Cherenkov and fluorescence light detectors. The 1600 water Cherenkov detectors are equally distributed over a sensitive area of 3000 square kilometers with 27 fluorescence light detectors overseeing this array. Besides the main instruments, a lot of R&D is done on new techniques for cosmic ray research. One of these projects is the Auger Engineering Radio Array (AERA) which measures the radio emission of extensive air showers. AERA is an array of antenna stations installed in 2011, which consisted of 24 log-periodic dipole antennas in the first stage. In the beginning of 2013, the array was extended by 100 new stations with butterfly antennas and improved electronics. Some of the new stations are also equipped with two scintillation detectors to provide additional options for triggering.

In this presentation, first results from new AERA data will be shown. A special remark lays on the analysis performed on data coming from the scintillation detectors. The measured particle densities can be used to improve the reconstruction of the air shower geometry by the Pierre Auger Observatory baseline detectors. This is very valuable, as the methods to investigate individual cosmic ray properties from the radio emission measurements highly depend on the air shower geometry.