Speaker
Description
Construction of SKA-Low is well underway in Australia. This telescope has a dense core of almost 60,000 antennas within a single square kilometer, and will offer a unique opportunity to measure air showers between the knee and the ankle regions in unprecedented detail. This is a critical energy range for probing the most powerful Galactic accelerators and the onset of the extragalactic component. The wide measurement bandwidth (50 - 350 MHz), sheer number of antennas that will observe air shower signals, and relatively uniform coverage of the radio footprint will allow for the most precise air shower measurements ever made. Using standard methods, we have demonstrated that with the SKA-Low we can achieve an Xmax precision of better than 8 g/cm$^2$ between $10^{16.6}$ eV and $10^{18}$ eV. Using new reconstruction methods, we expect to be able to reconstruct the full air shower development over a wide energy range, potentially down to PeV levels. At these energies, efficient photon/hadron separation could provide an opportunity to measure PeV gamma-ray air showers. Additionally, SKA-Low opens up a window to study high-energy hadronic interactions using anomalous air showers.
To facilitate air shower measurements at SKA-Low, we are building a radio-quiet particle detector array that will be installed at the SKA-Low core. This array will be used for triggering radio readout, as well as complementing radio measurements with information about the muonic air shower content. This will provide additional mass-sensitive information, and a way to study hadronic interactions. In this contribution, we give an overview of the cosmic-ray detection program, prospective analyses, and status of the particle detector array.