학술논문
TAROGE-M: radio antenna array on antarctic high mountain for detecting near-horizontal ultra-high energy air showers
Document Type
article
Author
Wang, Shih-Hao; Nam, Jiwoo; Chen, Pisin; Chen, Yaocheng; Choi, Taejin; Ham, Young-bae; Hsu, Shih-Ying; Huang, Jian-Jung; Huang, Ming-Huey A; Jee, Geonhwa; Jung, Jongil; Kim, Jieun; Kuo, Chung-Yun; Kwon, Hyuck-Jin; Lee, Changsup; Leung, Chung-Hei; Liu, Tsung-Che; Shiao, Yu-Shao J; Shin, Bok-Kyun; Wang, Min-Zu; Wang, Yu-Hsin; Anker, Astrid; Barwick, Steven W; Besson, Dave Z; Bouma, Sjoerd; Cataldo, Maddalena; Gaswint, Geoffrey; Glaser, Christian; Hallmann, Steffen; Hanson, Jordan C; Henrichs, Jakob; Kleinfelder, Stuart A; Lahmann, Robert; Meyers, Zachary S; Nelles, Anna; Novikov, Alexander; Paul, Manuel P; Pyras, Lilly; Persichilli, Christopher; Plaisier, Ilse; Rice-Smith, Ryan; Seikh, Mohammad FH; Tatar, Joulien; Welling, Christoph; Zhao, Leshan; collaborations, TAROGE and ARIANNA
Source
Journal of Cosmology and Astroparticle Physics. 2022(11)
Subject
Language
Abstract
The TAROGE-M observatory is an autonomous antenna array on the top of Mt. Melbourne (∼2700 m altitude) in Antarctica, designed to detect radio pulses from ultra-high energy (over 1017 eV) air showers coming from near-horizon directions. The targeted sources include cosmic rays, Earth-skimming tau neutrinos, and most of all, the anomalous near-horizon upward-going events of yet unknown origin discovered by ANITA experiments. The detection concept follows that of ANITA: monitoring large area of ice from high-altitude and taking advantage of strong geomagnetic field and quiet radio background in Antarctica, whereas having significantly greater livetime and scalability. The TAROGE-M station, upgraded from its prototype built in 2019, was deployed in January 2020, and consists of 6 log-periodic dipole antennas pointing horizontally with bandwidth of 180-450 MHz. The station is then calibrated with drone-borne transmitter, with which the event reconstruction obtained ∼0.3° angular resolution. The station was then smoothly operating in the following month, with the live time of ∼ 30 days, before interrupted by a power problem, and its online filtering has identified several candidate cosmic-ray events and sent out via satellite communication. In this paper, the instrumentation of the station for polar and high-altitude environment, its radio-locating performance, the preliminary result on cosmic-ray detection, and the future extension plan are presented.