Antarctic Radio Frequency Albedo and Implications for Cosmic Ray Reconstruction
Abstract
From an elevation of ~38 km, the balloon-borne ANtarctic Impulsive Transient Antenna (ANITA) is designed to detect the up-coming radio frequency (RF) signal resulting from a sub-surface neutrino-nucleon collision. Although no neutrinos have been discovered thus far, ANITA is nevertheless the only experiment to self-trigger on radio frequency emissions from cosmic-ray induced atmospheric air showers. In the majority of those cases, down-coming RF signals are observed via their reflection from the Antarctic ice sheet and back up to the ANITA interferometer. Estimating the energy scale of the incident cosmic rays therefore requires an estimate of the fractional power reflected at the air-ice interface. Similarly, inferring the energy of neutrinos interacting in-ice from observations of the upwards-directed signal refracting out to ANITA also requires consideration of signal coherence across the interface. By comparing the direct Solar RF signal intensity measured with ANITA to the surface-reflected Solar signal intensity, as a function of incident elevation angle relative to the surface {\Theta}, we estimate the power reflection coefficients R({\Theta}). We find general consistency between our average measurements and the values of R({\Theta}) expected from the Fresnel equations, separately for horizontal- vs. vertical-polarizations.
Keywords
Cite
@article{arxiv.1301.4423,
title = {Antarctic Radio Frequency Albedo and Implications for Cosmic Ray Reconstruction},
author = {D. Z. Besson and J. Stockham and M. Sullivan and P. Allison and S. W. Barwick and B. M. Baughman and J. J. Beatty and K. Belov and S. Bevan and W. R. Binns and C. Chen and P. Chen and J. M. Clem and A. Connolly and D. De Marco and P. F. Dowkontt and M. DuVernois and D. Goldstein and P. W. Gorham and E. W. Grashorn and B. Hill and S. Hoover and M. Huang and M. H. Israel and A. Javaid and J. Kowalski and J. Learned and K. M. Liewer and S. Matsuno and B. C. Mercurio and C. Miki and M. Mottram and J. Nam and C. J. Naudet and R. J. Nichol and K. Palladino and A. Romero-Wolf and L. Ruckman and D. Saltzberg and D. Seckel and R. Y. Shang and M. Stockham and G. S. Varner and A. G. Vieregg and Y. Wang},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1301.4423},
year = {2014}
}
Comments
final version as accepted for publication by Radio Science