Tapping the full potential of LOFAR cosmic-ray mass composition measurements with next-generation Monte Carlo simulations of radio emission from extensive air showers

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To understand the origin of cosmic rays, precise measurements of the energy and mass of the incoming particles are essential. Using radio detection of extensive air showers, very precise measurements of the mass composition of cosmic rays have already been achieved, in particular by the radio-astronomical telescope LOFAR. However, the analyses developed so far do not use the full information content of radio signals from extensive air showers: To limit the needed computation time, signal calculations with Monte Carlo simulations are only performed on a regular grid, followed by a time integration and spatial interpolation. The information loss incurred by this procedure currently limits the achievable resolution for mass composition measurements. In this project, we propose to perform explicit Monte Carlo simulations of radio signals from extensive air showers at the positions of the LOFAR antennas so that they can be correlated with the measured data. This approach increases the dimensionality of the parameter space that needs to be probed with Monte Carlo simulations from two to four dimensions. To cope with the ensuing massive increase of computing time, we plan to implement GPU parallelization of the Monte Carlo simulations of radio emission from air showers in the framework of the "CORSIKA 8" framework currently under development.