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General Treatment of Reflection of Spherical Electromagnetic Waves from Spherical, Uneven Antarctic Surface and Its Implications for the Mystery Events Detected by ANITA

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Abstract

We develop a general formalism to study the reflection of radio waves, generated by ultra high energy cosmic ray events, from the Antarctic ice surface. Our formalism is based on plane wave decomposition of spherical waves and is applicable to the observations made by the ANITA detector. We find that our numerical result shows good agreement with the calibration data obtained by the High-Altitude Calibration (HiCal) experiment. ce features such as the local sastrugi. We incorporate these roughness models to investigate whether the non-uniform surface roughness of Antarctica can explain these anomalous events.

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REFERENCES

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ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

We thank Prof. David Besson for valuable discussions. P. Dasgupta would like to thank Prof. David Besson and NASA for funding her visit to the Moscow International School of Physics 2020 (MISP 2020). P. Dasgupta would like to thank the committee members of MISP 2020 for giving her the opportunity to present her work.

Funding

This work was supported by the Science and Engineering Research Board, grant no. EMR/2016/004070 and the Scheme for Promotion of Academic and Research Collaboration, grant no. P250, Government of India.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Physics, Indian Institute of Technology Kanpur, 208016, Kanpur, India

    Paramita Dasgupta & Pankaj Jain

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  1. Paramita Dasgupta
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  2. Pankaj Jain
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Correspondence to Paramita Dasgupta or Pankaj Jain.

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Dasgupta, P., Jain, P. General Treatment of Reflection of Spherical Electromagnetic Waves from Spherical, Uneven Antarctic Surface and Its Implications for the Mystery Events Detected by ANITA. Bull. Lebedev Phys. Inst. 48, 59–62 (2021). https://doi.org/10.3103/S1068335621020020

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.3103/S1068335621020020

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