HE Seminar
Speaker: Stephanie Wissel
Title: Towards Precision Radio Detection of Cosmic Ray Showers with ANITA-3
Host: Mulhearn
Room: 432
Abstract: Every day hundreds of cosmic rays arrive at Earth traveling at nearly the speed of light, with energies many orders of magnitude beyond the energies produced by our own particle accelerators. Such energetic particles carry information about the most powerful accelerators in the universe, and their precise origin remains an outstanding question. These exceptional cosmic rays may be detected by training radio antennas on large swaths of dielectric material, such as the Antarctic ice sheets, as will be done with the upcoming ANITA-3 long duration balloon flight. In this talk, I will describe a recent test beam experiment, T-510 at SLAC, that calibrates the radio emission coming from cosmic ray air showers, thereby setting the energy scale for ANITA.
