Radio Detection of Cosmic Rays with Lopes

Abstract

Measuring radio pulses from cosmic ray air showers offers various new opportunities. New digital radio receivers allow measurements of these radio pulses even in environments that have lots of radio interference. With high bandwidth ADCs and fast data processing it is possible to store the whole waveform information in digital form and analyse transient events like air showers even after they have been recorded. Digital filtering and beam forming can be used to suppress the radio interference so that it is possible to measure the radio pulses even in radio loud environments. LOPES is a prototype station for the new digital radio interferometer LOFAR and is tailored to measure air showers. For this it is located at the site of the KASCADE-Grande air shower experiment. Already with the first phase of LOPES we have been able to measure radio pulses from air showers and show correlations between the radio pulse height and air shower parameters. The first part gives an introduction and presents the science results of LOPES, while the second part presents the hard- and software that enables LOPES to detect air short pulses.