Prospects for the Giant Metrewave Radio Telescope to observe radio waves from ultra high energy particles interacting with the Moon

Abstract

Ultra high energy (UHE) particles of cosmic origin impact the lunar regolith and produce radio signals through Askaryan effect, signals that can be detected by Earth based radio telescopes. We calculate the expected sensitivity for observation of such events at the Giant Metrewave Radio Telescope (GMRT), both for UHE cosmic rays (CR) and UHE neutrino interactions. We find that for 30 days of observation time a significant number of detectable events is expected above 10 20 eV for UHECR or neutrino fluxes close to the current limits. Null detection over a period of 30 days will lower the experimental bounds by a magnitude competitive to both present and future experiments at the very highest energies.

The sensitivity of past and near-future lunar radio experiments to ultra-high-energy cosmic rays and neutrinos

“…The first detailed estimation of the particle aperture of a lunar radio experiment comes from the Monte Carlo simulations of Gorham et al [19], which were followed by further simulations by Beresnyak [43], Scholten et al [44], Panda et al [45] and James and Protheroe [12], and an analytic approach by Gayley et al [6]. Comparing these models is difficult, because the code for each simulation is generally not published, and reimplementing them from their published descriptions is laborious, but it is possible to compare their published results when several models have been applied to the same experiment.…”

Mechanical properties of the radio frequency field emitted by an antenna array

“…Applications for the use of the orbital angular momentum in the radio domain, allowing digital manipulation under software control, were proposed in Ref. 18, including radio astronomy and space physics [19,20,21,22,23,24,25,26,27,28,29].…”