Ponente
Descripción
Situated near Summit Station, Greenland in 2023 and 2024, the Radar Echo Telescope for Cosmic Rays (RET-CR) experiment searched for radar echoes produced by reflections from in-ice cosmic-ray (CR) cascades. These secondary cascades are generated by energetic CR air showers impacting a high altitude ice sheet and depositing a portion of their energy into the ice. They can be detected with radar by illuminating the ice volume with a radio-frequency transmitter, and using receivers to record the radio signals scattered by the ionisation trails left in the wake of the cascades. A successful detection of an in-ice CR cascade will demonstrate the feasibility of the radar method, allowing it to be applied towards the detection of UHE cosmic neutrinos; the main goal of the Radar Echo Telescope (RET) collaboration. In this way, RET-CR is acting as a pathfinder experiment for the RET-N neutrino telescope, an experiment targeting PeV-EeV neutrinos to help provide insight into the highest energy astrophysical processes. In this work, we will discuss the radar detection method and the RET-CR experiment, focusing on the expected signal features and first data.
