Search for Cosmic Particles beyond the Zetta-eV Scale with the Moon

• Applicant: Dr. Tobias Winchen
• Subject Area: Nuclear and Elementary Particle Physics, Quantum Mechanics, Relativity, Fields ; Astrophysics and Astronomy
• Term: from 2017 to 2019
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 376253648

The highest energetic particles ever observed come from the cosmos and have energies more than ten million times higher than the particles that are accelerated at the Large Hadron Collider at CERN. This project will contribute to answer the question on the origin of the highest energetic particles observed today and search for particles at even higher energies, that might shed light on what happened during the Big Bang.To search for the extremely rare particles, large detector volumes are needed. Here, we will turn Earth’s Moon into a giant cosmic ray detector by pointing the LOFAR radio telescope at it. With LOFAR we can detect the very short radio pulses created by cosmic particles hitting the Moon. We will achieve a sensitivity to cosmic particles at extreme energies more than 100 times higher than any comparable experiment before. The major challenge in this project is to handle the tremendous amount of 1 TB of data that the LOFAR instrument generates every second. Coping with this data rate requires to implement the analysis algorithms on Graphics Processing Units (GPUs) instead of regular processors (CPUs). The technology developed in this project will be a milestone for analysis of data of the Square Kilometer Array (SKA) as the next generation radio telescope, and be useful also for other experiments.

• DFG Programme: Research Fellowships
• International Connection: Belgium
• Host: Professor Dr. Stijn Buitink