Interferometric Analysis of Air-shower Radio Emission in the Near Field with an Information Field Theory Approach
Keito Watanabe, Karen Terveer, Sjoerd Bouma, Justin Bray, Stijn Buitink, Arthur Corstanje, Vital De Henau, Tim Huege, Edwin Dickinson, Vincent Eberle, Torsten Enßlin, Brian Hare, Haoning He, Jörg Hörandel, Clancy James, Philipp Laub, Xingyu Li, Hermann-Josef Mathes, Katharine Mulrey, Anna Nelles, Subhadip Saha, Felix Schlüter, Olaf Scholten, Ralph Spencer, Christopher Sterpka, Satyendra Thoudam, Gia Trinh, Paulina Turekova, Darko Veberic, Chao Zhang, Pengfei Zhang, Yi Zhang
astro-ph.IM, astro-ph.HE
Submitted: 2026-06-25
Comments: Published in Advancing Astrophysics with the SKA II (AASKAII), 2026 (arXiv:2606.20366). Report-no:AASKAII/Watanabe01
Code: https://github.com/oogle/jax
License: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/4.0/
The gist: Current reconstruction techniques for air-shower radio emission generated by cosmic rays have shown great success, having been applied to several radio detectors over the last decade.
Terminology
Abstract
Current reconstruction techniques for air-shower radio emission generated by cosmic rays have shown great success, having been applied to several radio detectors over the last decade. Nevertheless, they are limited by their high computational cost, simplified approximations, and signal information used for reconstruction. As such, advanced analyses are required to not only be able to perform a holistic reconstruction of all parameters, but also to conduct near-field interferometry of the air shower. This can be achieved through Information Field Theory (IFT), an imaging reconstruction framework based on Bayesian inference that can extract all available information within the signal to infer distributions of field-like quantities. In this chapter, we highlight current novel approaches that use IFT for air shower reconstruction, and the potential of their applicability towards SKA-Low.
Sources
- A LOFAR-style reconstruction of cosmic-ray air showers with SKA-Low
- SMIET: Fast and accurate synthesis of radio pulses from extensive air shower using simulated templates
- Proof of principle for template synthesis approach for the radio emission from vertical extensive air showers
- Radio detection of cosmic ray air showers in the digital era
- Metric Gaussian Variational Inference
- Expected performance of air-shower measurements with the radio-interferometric technique
- Radio interferometry applied to the observation of cosmic-ray induced extensive air showers
- LOFAR: The LOw-Frequency ARray
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