416 research outputs found
The Tunka Experiment: Towards a 1-km^2 Cherenkov EAS Array in the Tunka Valley
The project of an EAS Cherenkov array in the Tunka valley/Siberia with an
area of about 1 km^2 is presented. The new array will have a ten times bigger
area than the existing Tunka-25 array and will permit a detailed study of the
cosmic ray energy spectrum and the mass composition in the energy range from
10^15 to 10^18 eV.Comment: 3 pages, 2 figures, to be published in IJMP
Tunka-Rex: energy reconstruction with a single antenna station (ARENA 2016)
The Tunka-Radio extension (Tunka-Rex) is a radio detector for air showers in
Siberia. From 2012 to 2014, Tunka-Rex operated exclusively together with its
host experiment, the air-Cherenkov array Tunka-133, which provided trigger,
data acquisition, and an independent air-shower reconstruction. It was shown
that the air-shower energy can be reconstructed by Tunka-Rex with a precision
of 15\% for events with signal in at least 3 antennas, using the radio
amplitude at a distance of 120\,m from the shower axis as an energy estimator.
Using the reconstruction from the host experiment Tunka-133 for the air-shower
geometry (shower core and direction), the energy estimator can in principle
already be obtained with measurements from a single antenna, close to the
reference distance. We present a method for event selection and energy
reconstruction, requiring only one antenna, and achieving a precision of about
20\%. This method increases the effective detector area and lowers thresholds
for zenith angle and energy, resulting in three times more events than in the
standard reconstruction
Discovery of an unusual bright eclipsing binary with the longest known period: TYC 2505-672-1 / MASTER OT J095310.04+335352.8
We report on the MASTER Global Robotic Net discovery of an eclipsing binary,
MASTER OT J095310.04+335352.8, previously known as unremarkable star TYC
2505-672-1, which displays extreme orbital parameters. The orbital period
P=69.1 yr is more than 2.5 times longer than that of epsilon-Aurigae, which is
the previous record holder. The light curve is characterized by an extremely
deep total eclipse with a depth of more than 4.5 mag, which is symmetrically
shaped and has a total duration of 3.5 yrs. The eclipse is essentially gray.
The spectra acquired with the Russian 6 m BTA telescope both at minimum and
maximum light mainly correspond to an M0-1III--type red giant, but the spectra
taken at the bottom of eclipse show small traces of a sufficiently hot source.
The observed properties of this system can be better explained as the red giant
eclipsed by a large cloud (the disk) of small particles surrounding the
invisible secondary companion.Comment: 8 figures, 9 pages, Astronomy and astrophysics in prin
Signal recognition and background suppression by matched filters and neural networks for Tunka-Rex
The Tunka Radio Extension (Tunka-Rex) is a digital antenna array, which
measures the radio emission of the cosmic-ray air-showers in the frequency band
of 30-80 MHz. Tunka-Rex is co-located with TAIGA experiment in Siberia and
consists of 63 antennas, 57 of them are in a densely instrumented area of about
1 km\textsuperscript{2}. In the present work we discuss the improvements of the
signal reconstruction applied for the Tunka-Rex. At the first stage we
implemented matched filtering using averaged signals as template. The
simulation study has shown that matched filtering allows one to decrease the
threshold of signal detection and increase its purity. However, the maximum
performance of matched filtering is achievable only in case of white noise,
while in reality the noise is not fully random due to different reasons. To
recognize hidden features of the noise and treat them, we decided to use
convolutional neural network with autoencoder architecture. Taking the recorded
trace as an input, the autoencoder returns denoised trace, i.e. removes all
signal-unrelated amplitudes. We present the comparison between standard method
of signal reconstruction, matched filtering and autoencoder, and discuss the
prospects of application of neural networks for lowering the threshold of
digital antenna arrays for cosmic-ray detection.Comment: ARENA2018 proceeding
Tunka-Rex: the Cost-Effective Radio Extension of the Tunka Air-Shower Observatory
Tunka-Rex is the radio extension of the Tunka cosmic-ray observatory in
Siberia close to Lake Baikal. Since October 2012 Tunka-Rex measures the radio
signal of air-showers in coincidence with the non-imaging air-Cherenkov array
Tunka-133. Furthermore, this year additional antennas will go into operation
triggered by the new scintillator array Tunka-Grande measuring the secondary
electrons and muons of air showers. Tunka-Rex is a demonstrator for how
economic an antenna array can be without losing significant performance: we
have decided for simple and robust SALLA antennas, and we share the existing
DAQ running in slave mode with the PMT detectors and the scintillators,
respectively. This means that Tunka-Rex is triggered externally, and does not
need its own infrastructure and DAQ for hybrid measurements. By this, the
performance and the added value of the supplementary radio measurements can be
studied, in particular, the precision for the reconstructed energy and the
shower maximum in the energy range of approximately eV. Here
we show first results on the energy reconstruction indicating that radio
measurements can compete with air-Cherenkov measurements in precision.
Moreover, we discuss future plans for Tunka-Rex.Comment: Proceeding of UHECR 2014, Springdale, Utah, USA, accepted by JPS
Conference Proceeding
Towards a cosmic-ray mass-composition study at Tunka Radio Extension (ARENA 2016)
The Tunka Radio Extension (Tunka-Rex) is a radio detector at the TAIGA
facility located in Siberia nearby the southern tip of Lake Baikal. Tunka-Rex
measures air-showers induced by high-energy cosmic rays, in particular, the
lateral distribution of the radio pulses. The depth of the air-shower maximum,
which statistically depends on the mass of the primary particle, is determined
from the slope of the lateral distribution function (LDF). Using a
model-independent approach, we have studied possible features of the
one-dimensional slope method and tried to find improvements for the
reconstruction of primary mass. To study the systematic uncertainties given by
different primary particles, we have performed simulations using the CONEX and
CoREAS software packages of the recently released CORSIKA v7.5 including the
modern high-energy hadronic models QGSJet-II.04 and EPOS-LHC. The simulations
have shown that the largest systematic uncertainty in the energy deposit is due
to the unknown primary particle. Finally, we studied the relation between the
polarization and the asymmetry of the LDF.Comment: ARENA proceedings, 4 pages, updated reference
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