https://doi.org/10.1051/epjconf/201713501016
Simulation of the Radiation Energy Release in Air Showers
1 RWTH Aachen University, III. Physikalisches Institut A, Aachen, Germany
2 IMAPP, Radboud University Nijmegen, Nijmegen, Netherlands
3 Nikhef, Science Park, Amsterdam, Netherlands
4 Karlsruhe Institute of Technology, Institut für Kernphysik, Karlsruhe, Germany
* e-mail: glaser@physik.rwth-aachen.de
Published online: 15 March 2017
A simulation study of the energy released by extensive air showers in the form of MHz radiation is performed using the CoREAS simulation code. We develop an efficient method to extract this radiation energy from air-shower simulations. We determine the longitudinal profile of the radiation energy release and compare it to the longitudinal profile of the energy deposit by the electromagnetic component of the air shower. We find that the radiation energy corrected for the geometric dependence of the geomagnetic emission scales quadratically with the energy in the electromagnetic component of the air shower with a second order dependency on the atmospheric density at the position of the maximum of the shower development Xmax. In a measurement where Xmax is not accessible, this second order dependence can be approximated using the zenith angle of the incoming direction of the air shower with only a minor deterioration in accuracy. This method results in an intrinsic uncertainty of 4% with respect to the electromagnetic shower energy which is well below current experimental uncertainties.
© The Authors, published by EDP Sciences, 2017
This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License 4.0, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.
