Considerations on the radio emission from extended air showers
- INFN, Sezione di Padova, Via Marzolo 8, I-35131 Padova (Italy)
The process of radio emission from extended air showers produced by high energy cosmic rays has reached a good level of comprehension and prediction. It has a coherent nature, so the emitted power scales quadratically with the energy of the primary particle. Recently, a laboratory measurement has revealed that an incoherent radiation mechanism exists, namely, the bremsstrahlung emission. In this paper we expound why bremsstrahlung radiation, that should be present in showers produced by ultra high energy cosmic rays, has escaped detection so far, and why, on the other side, it could be exploited, in the 1–10 GHz frequency range, to detect astronomical γ-rays. We propose an experimental scheme to verify such hypothesis, which, if correct, would deeply impact on the observational γ-ray astronomy.
- OSTI ID:
- 22667560
- Journal Information:
- Journal of Cosmology and Astroparticle Physics, Vol. 2016, Issue 05; Other Information: Country of input: International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA); ISSN 1475-7516
- Country of Publication:
- United States
- Language:
- English
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