Jun 8 – 11, 2026
Schlosshotel Karlsruhe
Europe/Berlin timezone

Modelling In-Ice Secondary Cosmic Ray Cascades

Jun 10, 2026, 12:15 PM
15m
Schlosshotel Karlsruhe

Schlosshotel Karlsruhe

Bahnhofplatz 2, 76137 Karlsruhe, Germany

Speaker

Isha Loudon

Description

Cosmic-Ray (CR) air-showers impacting a high-altitude ice sheet impart a significant fraction of energy into the ice, forming a dense cascade below the ice surface. Above PeV energies, these secondary CR cascades are the target of the RET-CR experiment, and their associated radio-Askaryan emission makes them a background source in radio-neutrino detectors, such as ARA and RNO-G. This process can be simulated with the FAERIE code package, which consists of a two-step process: First, the CORSIKA package is used to simulate the CR-induced air-shower, the output from which is then propagated into the ice with the GEANT4 framework to obtain the secondary cascade. This way, FAERIE provides an accurate description of the cascade as well as shower-to-shower fluctuation effects. However, these frameworks become computationally expensive at the higher CR energies. In this work, we explore an alternative method to generate in-ice cascade profiles, utilising the particle footprint from CORSIKA simulations at the air-ice boundary. Original modifications of standard air-shower parameterisations allow the resulting in-ice cascade to be quickly obtained. We outline the method, show a comparison to full FAERIE simulations and discuss possible future applications.

Authors

Enrique Huesca Santiago Isha Loudon Jannes Loonen (Vrije Universiteit Brussel) Jethro Stoffels Katie Mulrey (Radboud) Krijn de Vries (Vrije Universiteit Brussel) Krishna Nivedita Simona Toscano (Université Libre de Bruxelles)

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