Reconstructing air shower parameters with MGMR3D: Physical Review D

Measuring the radio emission from cosmic-ray particle cascades has proven to be a very efficient method to determine their properties such as the mass composition. Efficient modeling of the radio emission from air showers is crucial in order to extract the cosmic-ray physics parameters from the measured radio emission. MGMR3D is a fast semianalytic code that calculates the complete radio footprint, i.e., intensity, polarization, and pulse shapes, for a parametrized shower-current density and can be used in a chi-square optimization to fit a given radio data. It is many orders of magnitude faster than its Monte Carlo counterparts. We provide a detailed comparative study of MGMR3D to Monte Carlo simulations, where, with improved parametrizations, the shower maximum Xmax is found to have very strong agreement with a small dependency on the incoming zenith angle of the shower. Another interesting feature we observe with MGMR3D is sensitivity to the shape of the longitudinal profile in addition to Xmax. This is achieved by probing the distinguishable radio footprint produced by a shower having a different longitudinal profile than usual. Furthermore, for the first time, we show the results of reconstructing shower parameters for Low-Frequency Array data using MGMR3D, and obtaining a Xmax resolution of 22 g/cm2 and energy resolution of 19%. © 2023 American Physical Society.