33RD INTERNATIONAL COSMIC RAY CONFERENCE, RIO DE JANEIRO 2013 THE ASTROPARTICLE PHYSICS CONFERENCE Probing air-shower physics by Cherenkov effects in radio emission

Abstract: The last decade has seen a rapid progress in measuring as well as theoretical modeling radio-wave emission from cosmic-ray-induced air showers. The main mechanisms are now known to be the geomagnetic emission due to deflection of electrons and positrons in Earth’s magnetic field and the charge-excess emission due to a net electron excess in the air shower front. Recently it was shown that Cherenkov effects play an important role in the radio emission from air showers. Here we show the importance of these effects to extract quantitatively the position of the shower maximum from the radio signal, which is a sensitive measure for the mass of the initial cosmic ray