1. TAROGE-M: Radio Observatory on Antarctic High Mountain for Detecting Near-Horizon Ultra-High Energy Air Showers
- Author
-
Ilse Plaisier, N. Bingefors, Daniel García Fernández, J. Tatar, Chung-Yun Kuo, Stephen McAleer, Leshan Zhao, Mitchell Magnuson, Allan Hallgren, Pisin Chen, Jordan C. Hanson, D. Z. Besson, Christoph Welling, Steven W. Barwick, A. Nelles, M.-H. A. Huang, Yu-Shao Jerry Shiao, Tsung-Che Liu, Pierre Baldi, Min-Zu Wang, Ryan Rice-Smith, Yaocheng Chen, A. Anker, C. Persichilli, G. Gaswint, Jiayi Liu, Manuel P. Paul, Robert Lahmann, Chung-Hei Leung, Hans Bernhoff, Stuart A. Kleinfelder, Christian Glaser, Jakob Beise, S. R. Klein, Yu-Hsin Wang, Jiwoo Nam, Jian-Jung Huang, Alexander Novikov, and Shih-Hao Wang
- Subjects
Astrophysics::High Energy Astrophysical Phenomena ,Transmitter ,Astrophysics::Instrumentation and Methods for Astrophysics ,Cosmic ray ,law.invention ,Antenna array ,Earth's magnetic field ,Observatory ,law ,Communications satellite ,Dipole antenna ,Geology ,Event reconstruction ,Remote sensing - Abstract
The TAROGE-M observatory is an autonomous antenna array on the top of Mt.~Melbourne ($\sim2700$ m altitude) in Antarctica, designed to detect radio pulses from ultra-high energy (over $10^{17}$ 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 $\sim0.3^\circ$ angular resolution. The station was then smoothly operating in the following month, with the live time of $\sim30$ 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.
- Published
- 2021