Reconstruction of very inclined air showers with radio data and application to the first GRANDProto300 cosmic-ray candidates
Abstract
Radio detection of very inclined extensive air showers (EAS) offers a promising way to study ultra-high-energy cosmic rays (UHECRs) and neutrinos above 1017 eV. We present a method to reconstruct the arrival direction and energy of EAS with zenith angles above 60∘, applicable in principle to upward-going neutrino-induced showers. The approach combines a point-source-like description of the radio wavefront with the Angular Distribution Function (ADF), a phenomenological model describing the angular pattern of electric field amplitudes in the 50-200 MHz band. On realistic cosmic-ray simulations, we achieve better than 0.07∘ resolution on arrival direction and ~15\% on primary energy. Applied directly to voltage traces, this method allows efficient cosmic-ray selection with accurate direction reconstruction and first-order energy estimation. We illustrate the method on the first cosmic-ray candidates detected by the GRANDProto300 prototype of GRAND, validating its detection principle and paving the way for high-precision neutrino searches.
Related
- Corrected detector-level reconstruction of inclined radio air showers from trigger-level ADC waveforms
- Reconstruction of anomalous air showers with SKA-Low
- Search for Cosmic Rays in GRANDProto300
- NERV: Neural-network Enhanced Reconstruction of the UniVerse with Application to Baryon Acoustic Oscillations in the BOSS DR12 Galaxy Sample
- Radio measurements of air showers with the IceCube-Gen2 surface prototype station at the Pierre Auger Observatory
BibTeX
@misc{guelfand2026reconstruction,
title = {{Reconstruction of very inclined air showers with radio data and application to the first GRANDProto300 cosmic-ray candidates}},
author = {Marion Guelfand and Valentin Decoene and Olivier Martineau and Simon Prunet and Sebastian Castro-Isern and Nathan Lebas},
howpublished = {arXiv},
year = {2026},
month = oct,
doi = {10.48550/arxiv.2610.36282},
eprint = {2610.36282},
archivePrefix = {arXiv},
url = {https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.36282},
note = {CC BY-NC-ND 4.0},
}
RIS
TY - UNPB
TI - Reconstruction of very inclined air showers with radio data and application to the first GRANDProto300 cosmic-ray candidates
AU - Marion Guelfand
AU - Valentin Decoene
AU - Olivier Martineau
AU - Simon Prunet
AU - Sebastian Castro-Isern
AU - Nathan Lebas
PY - 2026
DA - 2026/10/26
PB - arXiv
DO - 10.48550/arxiv.2610.36282
UR - https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.36282
AB - Radio detection of very inclined extensive air showers (EAS) offers a promising way to study ultra-high-energy cosmic rays (UHECRs) and neutrinos above 10^17 eV. We present a method to reconstruct the arrival direction and energy of EAS with zenith angles above 60^∘, applicable in principle to upward-going neutrino-induced showers. The approach combines a point-source-like description of the radio wavefront with the Angular Distribution Function (ADF), a phenomenological model describing the angular pattern of electric field amplitudes in the 50-200 MHz band. On realistic cosmic-ray simulations, we achieve better than 0.07^∘ resolution on arrival direction and ~15\% on primary energy. Applied directly to voltage traces, this method allows efficient cosmic-ray selection with accurate direction reconstruction and first-order energy estimation. We illustrate the method on the first cosmic-ray candidates detected by the GRANDProto300 prototype of GRAND, validating its detection principle and paving the way for high-precision neutrino searches.
ER -