Speaker
Description
We develop a general formalism to treat reflection of spherical electromagnetic waves from a spherical surface. Our main objective is interpret radio wave signals produced by cosmic ray interactions with Earth’s atmosphere which are observed by the Antarctica based ANITA detector after reflection off the ice surface. The incident wave is decomposed into plane waves and each plane wave is reflected off the surface using the standard Fresnel formalism. For each plane wave, the reflected wave is assumed to be locally a plane wave. This is a very reasonable assumption and there are no uncontrolled approximations in our treatment of the reflection phenomenon. The surface roughness effects are also included by using a simple fractal roughness model. We apply our formalism to the radiation produced by the balloon-borne HiCal radio-frequency (RF) transmitter.
Our final results for the reflected power are found to be in good agreement with HiCal 2 data for all elevation angles. We also simulate the reflected H-Pol and V-Pol pulses using HiCal-2 direct pulses. The resulting reflected pulses are found to be 180 degree out of phase with the direct signal for all elevation angles.
