Results and Perspectives of the Auger Engineering Radio Array

RWTH Aachen University, III. Physikalisches Institut A, Aachen, Germany

^* e-mail: glaser@physik.rwth-aachen.de
² Full author list: http://auger.org/archive/authors_2016_06.html

Published online: 15 March 2017

Abstract

The Auger Engineering Radio Array (AERA) is an extension of the Pierre Auger Cosmic-Ray Observatory. It is used to detect radio emission from extensive air showers with energies beyond 10¹⁷ eV in the 30 - 80 MHz frequency band. After three phases of deployment, AERA now consists of more than 150 autonomous radio stations with different spacings, covering an area of about 17km². It is located at the same site as other Auger low-energy detector extensions enabling combinations with various other measurement techniques. The radio array allows different technical schemes to be explored as well as cross-calibration of our measurements with the established baseline detectors of the Auger Observatory. We report on the most recent technological developments and give an overview of the experimental results obtained with AERA. In particular, we will present the measurement of the radiation energy, i.e., the amount of energy that is emitted by the air shower in the form of radio emission, and its dependence on the cosmic-ray energy by comparing with the measurement of the the well-calibrated Auger surface detector. Furthermore, we outline the relevance of this result for the absolute calibration of the energy scale of cosmic-ray observatories.