Cecilia Payne-Gaposchkin Doctoral Dissertation Award in Astrophysics

Revealing the nature of the Milky Way’s most extreme particle accelerators is a key challenge for multi-messenger astrophysics. Most of the Milky Way’s cosmic rays originate in supernova remnants, but the highest energy Galactic cosmic rays may require another, unidentified source.  Since cosmic ray trajectories do not point back to their sources, identifying their origins will require precise measurements of shifts in cosmic ray mass composition.

Cosmic rays interacting with our atmosphere produce a brief (5-10 nanosecond) flash of radio emission, which is sensitive to the cosmic ray mass.  I will present a new cosmic ray detection system at the Owens Valley Radio Observatory Long Wavelength Array (OVRO-LWA) that relies only on this radio emission to observe 100—1000 PeV cosmic rays.  Finding cosmic rays amid a background of anthropogenic radio frequency interference is a needle in a haystack problem that is solved with a multi-stage method that searches ~1 Tb/s of data, successfully finding cosmic rays amid the millions of impulsive RFI transients per day.  This talk will describe the OVRO-LWA cosmic ray experiment and set it in the context of the landscape of Milky Way cosmic rays.