Beyond Xmax: Reconstructing Air Shower Profiles with Information Field Theory with SKA-Low
K. Watanabe*, T. Huege, T. Enßlin, V. Eberle, S. Bouma, J.D. Bray, S. Buitink, A. Corstanje, E. Dickinson, T. Gottmer, B. Hare, H. He, V. De Henau, J. Hörandel, C. James, M. Jetti, P. Laub, X. Li, M. Lourens, H.J. Mathes, K. Mulrey, A. Nelles, S. Saha, F. Schlüter, O. Scholten, R. Spencer, C. Sterpka, S. ter Veen, K. Terveer, G. Trinh, P. Turekova, D. Veberič, M. Waterson, C. Zhang, P. Zhang and Y. Zhanget al. (click to show)
*: corresponding author
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Pre-published on: September 04, 2026
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Abstract
While radio measurements of extensive air showers have shown to achieve a high precision of $X_\mathrm{max}$ sensitivity, it has been shown that parameters beyond $X_\mathrm{max}$ can also be reconstructed. These shape parameters contain additional sensitivity to the hadronic physics in the shower as well as its mass composition. In this work, we showcase a reconstruction framework to recover the full longitudinal profile from realistic radio measurements. The framework is based on Information Field Theory that infers the full profile with a forward-based model, which uses a Gaisser-Hillas profile with weakly informative shower priors, SMIET with a template library to synthesise pulses at any event geometry, and a realistic antenna response and noise level emulating that of SKA-Low. We verify the self-consistency of our framework with $\sim 900$ events generated with SMIET with antennas placed on the $\vec{v} \times (\vec{v} \times \vec{B} )$ axis. The framework recovers the full profile within uncertainty and capture correlations between shower parameters. We yield an $X_\mathrm{max}$ resolution of $< 9$ g cm$^{-2}$ as well as resolutions of the width and asymmetry with minimal bias. The profile is also recovered with a bias of $< 4$% at all atmospheric depths $< 1200$ g cm$^{-2}$. We aim to apply this framework with pulses simulated from CoREAS with measured noise, ultimately extending the framework to realistic antenna layouts such as from LOFAR or SKA-Low.
DOI: https://doi.org/10.22323/1.538.0037
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