Historical Pageantry and the "Fusion of the Races" at the Tercentenary of Quebec, 1908

Complex political and circumstantial forces worked to transform a modest municipal celebration of the 300th anniversary of Champlain’s founding of his habitation at Quebec into the Tercentenary of the Founding of Canada. The centrepiece of the spectacle was the series of historical pageants produced by a British pageant director with the advice of members of the Comité d’histoire et d’archéologie of Quebec. In a combination of careful selection, deft balancing, and misrepresentation of fact, the powerful and lavish theatre of the pageants displayed a view of Canadian history designed to serve explicit contemporary political goals.Des forces politiques et circonstancielles complexes se sont conjuguées pour transformer une modeste fête municipale du 300e anniversaire de la fondation de Québec par Champlain en tricentenaire de la fondation du Canada. Le clou du spectacle fut la série de spectacles historiques produits par un directeur de reconstitutions historiques avec les conseils des membres du Comité d’histoire et d’archéologie de Québec. Alliant un choix judicieux, un habile équilibre et une présentation erronée des faits, le théâtre puissant et somptueux des reconstitutions brossait un tableau de l’histoire canadienne conçu explicitement à des fins politiques contemporaines

Polarized radio emission from extensive air showers measured with LOFAR

We present LOFAR measurements of radio emission from extensive air showers. We find that this emission is strongly polarized, with a median degree of polarization of nearly $99\%$, and that the angle between the polarization direction of the electric field and the Lorentz force acting on the particles, depends on the observer location in the shower plane. This can be understood as a superposition of the radially polarized charge-excess emission mechanism, first proposed by Askaryan and the geomagnetic emission mechanism proposed by Kahn and Lerche. We calculate the relative strengths of both contributions, as quantified by the charge-excess fraction, for $163$ individual air showers. We find that the measured charge-excess fraction is higher for air showers arriving from closer to the zenith. Furthermore, the measured charge-excess fraction also increases with increasing observer distance from the air shower symmetry axis. The measured values range from $(3.3\pm 1.0)\%$ for very inclined air showers at $25\, \mathrm{m}$ to $(20.3\pm 1.3)\%$ for almost vertical showers at $225\, \mathrm{m}$. Both dependencies are in qualitative agreement with theoretical predictions.Comment: 22 pages, 14 figures, accepted for publication in JCA

The radio emission pattern of air showers as measured with LOFAR - a tool for the reconstruction of the energy and the shower maximum

The pattern of the radio emission of air showers is finely sampled with the Low-Frequency ARray (LOFAR). A set of 382 measured air showers is used to test a fast, analytic parameterization of the distribution of pulse powers. Using this parameterization we are able to reconstruct the shower axis and give estimators for the energy of the air shower as well as the distance to the shower maximum.Comment: 15 pages, 10 figures, accepted for publication in JCA

A method for high precision reconstruction of air shower Xmax using two-dimensional radio intensity profiles

The mass composition of cosmic rays contains important clues about their origin. Accurate measurements are needed to resolve long-standing issues such as the transition from Galactic to extragalactic origin, and the nature of the cutoff observed at the highest energies. Composition can be studied by measuring the atmospheric depth of the shower maximum Xmax of air showers generated by high-energy cosmic rays hitting the Earth's atmosphere. We present a new method to reconstruct Xmax based on radio measurements. The radio emission mechanism of air showers is a complex process that creates an asymmetric intensity pattern on the ground. The shape of this pattern strongly depends on the longitudinal development of the shower. We reconstruct Xmax by fitting two-dimensional intensity profiles, simulated with CoREAS, to data from the LOFAR radio telescope. In the dense LOFAR core, air showers are detected by hundreds of antennas simultaneously. The simulations fit the data very well, indicating that the radiation mechanism is now well-understood. The typical uncertainty on the reconstruction of Xmax for LOFAR showers is 17 g/cm^2.Comment: 12 pages, 10 figures, submitted to Phys. Rev.

Inferring the time-dependent complex Ginzburg-Landau equation from modulus data

We present a formalism for inferring the equation of evolution of a complex wave field that is known to obey an otherwise unspecified (2+1)-dimensional time-dependent complex Ginzburg-Landau equation, given field moduli over three closely-spaced planes. The phase of the complex wave field is retrieved via a non-interferometric method, and all terms in the equation of evolution are determined using only the magnitude of the complex wave field. The formalism is tested using simulated data for a generalized nonlinear system with a single-component complex wave field. The method can be generalized to multi-component complex fields.Comment: 9 pages, 9 figure

Cosmic Ray Physics with the LOFAR Radio Telescope

The LOFAR radio telescope is able to measure the radio emission from cosmic ray induced air showers with hundreds of individual antennas. This allows for precision testing of the emission mechanisms for the radio signal as well as determination of the depth of shower maximum $X_{\max}$, the shower observable most sensitive to the mass of the primary cosmic ray, to better than 20 g/cm$^2$. With a densely instrumented circular area of roughly 320 m$^2$, LOFAR is targeting for cosmic ray astrophysics in the energy range $10^{16}$ - $10^{18}$ eV. In this contribution we give an overview of the status, recent results, and future plans of cosmic ray detection with the LOFAR radio telescope.Comment: Proceedings of the 26th Extended European Cosmic Ray Symposium (ECRS), Barnaul/Belokurikha, 201