Instruments and Methods for the Radio Detection of High Energy Cosmic Rays

Cosmic rays consist of elementary particles with enormous energy which originate from outside our solar system and constantly hit the Earth’s atmosphere. Where do these cosmic rays originate? How does nature accelerate the cosmic-ray particles to energies with orders of magnitude beyond the limits of manmade particle accelerators? What can we learn by measuring the interactions of the cosmic rays with the atmosphere? Digital radio-antenna arrays offer a promising, complementary measurement method for high-energy cosmic rays. This thesis reports on substantial advances in the development of the radio technique, which will be used to address these questions in future experiments.

Dr. Frank Schroder's PhD thesis was awarded the 2012 Dissertation Price of the Deutschen Physikalischen Gesellschaft (DPG), section Gravitation and Relativity, Physics of Hadrons, Nuclei and Particle Physics. He did his PhD at the physics faculty of the Karlsruhe Institut of Technologie (KIT), where he is now leading the Tunka-Rex junior research group.