Paper detail

LOPES 3D -- studies on the benefits of EAS-radio measurements with vertically aligned antennas

The LOPES experiment was a radio interferometer built at the existing air shower array KASCADE-Grande in Karlsruhe, Germany. The last configuration of LOPES was called LOPES 3D and consisted of ten tripole antennas. Each of these antennas consisted of three crossed dipoles east-west, north-south, and vertically aligned. With this, LOPES 3D had the unique possibility to study the benefits of measurements with vertically aligned antennas in the environment of the well understood and calibrated particle detector array KASCADE-Grande. The measurements with three spatially coincident antennas allows a redundant reconstruction of the electric field vector. Several methods to exploit the redundancy were developed and tested. Furthermore, for the first time in LOPES, the background noise could be studied polarization- and direction dependent. With LOPES 3D it could be demonstrated that radio detection reaches a higher efficiency for inclined showers when including measurements with vertically aligned antennas and that the vertical component gets more important for the measurement of inclined showers. In this contribution we discuss a weighting scheme for the best combination of three redundant reconstructed electric field vectors. Furthermore, we discuss the influence of these weighting schemes on the ability to reconstruct air showers using the radio method. We show an estimate of the radio efficiency for inclined showers with focus on the benefits of measurements with vertically aligned antennas and we present the direction dependent noise in the different polarizations.