Present status and prospects of the Tunka Radio Extension

¹ Institut für Kernphysik, Karlsruhe Institute of Technology (KIT), Karlsruhe, 76021 Germany
² Institute of Applied Physics ISU, Irkutsk, 664020 Russia
³ Institut für Prozessdatenverarbeitung und Elektronik, Karlsruhe Institute of Technology (KIT)
⁴ Skobeltsyn Institute of Nuclear Physics MSU, Moscow, 119991 Russia
⁵ Department of Physics and Astronomy, University of Delaware Newark, DE, USA

^★ now at the University of Zürich
^★★ also at Vrije Universiteit Brussel, Brussels, Belgium

Published online: 24 September 2019

Abstract

The Tunka Radio Extension (Tunka-Rex) is a digital radio array operating in the frequency band of 30-80 MHz and detecting radio emission from air-showers produced by cosmic rays with energies above 100 PeV. The experimentis installed at the site of the TAIGA (Tunka Advanced Instrument for cosmic rays and Gamma Astronomy) observatory and performs joint measurements with the co-located particle and air-Cherenkov detectors in passive mode receiving a trigger from the latter. Tunka-Rex collects data since 2012, and during the last five years went throughseveral upgrades. As a result the density of the antenna field was increased by three times since its commission. In this contribution we present the latest results of Tunka-Rex experiment, particularly an updated analysis and efficiency study, which have been applied to the measurement of the mean shower maximum as a function of energy for cosmic rays of energies up to EeV. The future plans are also discussed: investigations towards an energy spectrum of cosmic rays with Tunka-Rex and their mass composition using a combination of Tunka-Rex data with muon measurements by the particle detector Tunka-Grande.