Improved measurements of the energy and shower maximum of cosmic rays with Tunka-Rex

Understand

The Tunka Radio Extension (Tunka-Rex) is an array of 63 antennas located in the Tunka Valley, Siberia.

• It detects radio pulses in the 30-80 MHz band produced during the air-shower development.
• As shown by Tunka-Rex, a sparse radio array with about 200 m spacing is able to reconstruct the energy and the depth of the shower maximum with satisfactory precision using simple methods based on parameters of the lateral distribution of amplitudes.
• The LOFAR experiment has shown that a sophisticated treatment of all individually measured amplitudes of a dense antenna array can make the precision comparable with the resolution of existing optical techniques.