Development of a Detector Response Model and an Autonomous Trigger for the Detection of Air-Shower Radio Emission

Radio detection of air-showers has proven to be very advantageous for the measurement of ultra-high energy cosmic rays. As a consequence, a new generation of radio detectors is now evolving at much larger scales. The Giant Radio Array for Neutrino Detection (GRAND) is planned as an array of wide-band radio antennas, which will cover a total area of 200 000 km2. In order to reliably distinguish air-shower events from noise for such large arrays, an efficient and autonomous multi-level radio trigger is developed*. The first-level trigger selects an antenna signal according to expected signal shapes, whereas the second-level trigger refines this selection according to information of all antennas triggered during the same event.

While the deployment of GRAND is in progress, a digital detector model is being developed. It will include a sufficiently accurate instrument response and signal processing methods. It will then make it possible to analyze the detector response and determine significant parameters that are needed for building this novel trigger method. This talk will cover the approaches to build a realistic response model and the multi-level radio trigger needed for large-scale experiments like GRAND. ... mehr* NUTRIG project, supported by the ANR-DFG Funding Programme (RO 4165/2-1)