Speaker
Description
High-energy neutrinos from astrophysical sources can show us parts of the universe that photons cannot reach. One way to detect them is through the radio pulses from the particle showers they produce in the ice of Antarctica and Greenland. Recently, ARA observed such radio pulses from cosmic-ray showers hitting the ice, showing that these signals can be seen in practice. The radio emission of a shower is fairly well understood, but how the pulse changes on its way through the ice is much less clear. In the upper ~100 m, the firn, the refractive index changes with depth: the signal is refracted and delayed, density layers can trap it like a waveguide, and birefringence can change its polarization. We use CORSIKA 8 to simulate showers in ice and compare two ways of calculating the radio signal: the ZHS algorithm with ray-tracing and a Green's function method. In a uniform medium, the two methods agree in timing to within 20 ps. Next, we will compare them in realistic firn models to find out where the traditional ray-tracing approach breaks down.