Reconstruction of Radio Emission from Extensive Air Showers using Information Field Theory

The Pierre Auger Observatory is the currently largest observatory for the detection of ultra-high energy cosmic rays. During the development of extensive air showers induced by cosmic rays, the separation of charged particles in the shower creates radio emission. This emission can be used to reconstruct the air shower by determining the arrival direction, energy and mass of the cosmic ray particle. After successful testing at the Auger Engineering Radio Array, antennas are currently being deployed to all 1660 detector stations of the observatory, to increase the exposure of the observatory.

To reconstruct the air shower, it is necessary to first extract the electric field from of the noisy measurements of the voltage in the antenna. This can be achieved using Information Field Theory. The algorithms developed with this formalism based on Bayesian statistics can infer not only the maximum likelihood signal but also its uncertainty from noisy data, given only a forward model of the measurement process. I will present the current advancements in this signal reconstruction using these methods on the radio detector of the Pierre Auger Observatory.