Extreme‐precision measurements of cosmic rays via radio detection with the SKA

The future SKA‐low will provide an extremely dense and very homogeneous antenna array on an
area of roughly 0.5 km^2 and with a large bandwidth of 50‐350 MHz. With minor engineering
changes it would be ideally suited to detect extensive air showers initiated by cosmic rays in the
Earth’s atmosphere via their pulsed radio emission. The very precise measurements of individual
cosmic‐ray air‐shower events allows detailed studies of the mass composition in the energy range
around 10^17 eV where the transition from a galactic to an extragalactic origin could occur. We
present a simulation study on cosmic‐ray detection with focus on the potential to reconstruct the
depth of shower maximum for individual showers to be measured with SKA‐low, resulting in an
expected intrinsic uncertainty on the Xmax reconstruction of less than 10 g/cm^2. We will discuss the
dependencies of the uncertainty on the direction and energy of the primary as well as the
parameters of the antenna array, e.g. the analysed bandwidth and antenna density.