Simulating an imaging atmospheric radio telescope to observe cosmic gamma rays and cosmic neutrinos

Observations of cosmic gamma rays with energies above the 10 12 electronvolts (TeV) regime are often a direct probe of events where our theoretical predictions are challenged by extreme conditions. Because high energetic cosmic gamma rays are rare, one needs collection areas with the size of roughly a dozen football fields (10 5 m 2 ) or more to gather significant counting statistics in a short time. The imaging atmospheric Cherenkov telescope detects cosmic gamma rays in such large areas and currently offers the best reconstruction power for the cosmic particle’s type, energy, and direction in particular. However, with only about 1,000 hours of dark and clear nights every year, the imaging atmospheric Cherenkov telescope only has a duty cycle of about 12%. To overcome this limitation, we propose a novel imaging atmospheric radio telescope. By observing radio emission in the 10 GHz regime from air showers, the imaging atmospheric radio telescope could observe 24/7, independent of the day night cycle, and almost independent of the weather. The novelty here is the high resolution imaging of the air shower’s radio emission which might result in high resolution images as one finds them in imaging atmospheric Cherenkov telescopes. We present a technique to simulate the image formation in the radio telescope using wave mechanics instead of conventional ray tracing. The imaging atmospheric radio telescope could increase our duty-cycle more than eightfold for high energy gamma ray observations. Further, the imaging atmospheric radio telescope might also eightfold the observation power for cosmic neutrinos in the so called Earth-skimming technique.