Conventions in this package¶

We chose our conventions to align as much as possible with NuRadio.

Coordinate system¶

We use a right-handed coordinate system, with the z-axis pointing upwards. The x-axis points to magnetic East and the y-axis to magnetic North. This is essentially the CORSIKA coordinate system rotated by 90 degrees.

Furthermore, we also use arrival direction instead of travel direction. Hence, \(\phi = 0^{\circ}\) in our system means that the shower is _coming_ from the East, not travelling towards it. In the same vein, \(\phi = -90^{\circ}\) means that the shower is coming from the South (which in CORSIKA would be azimuth equal to 0) and setting \(\phi = 90^{\circ}\) implies that the shower comes from North.

Units¶

To keep track of the units in this package, we use the same unit system as NuRadio. Just like in that package we provide a units module that can be used to give each variable physical units. Each input is multiplied by its corresponding unit. To retrieve a value in a specific unit, you divide the output by the unit. For example, to retrieve a distance in centimeters, you can divide the variable by units.cm. Of course the output will only make sense if the variable is divided by a unit of the same dimension. The module is documented here.

Caution

The only notable exception is the atmospheric grammages. In all aspects of the package, we do not use the internal unit system (i.e. using the units module) for grammages, but rather leave them in g/cm2 directly. This affects the longitudinal profiles of the Shower objects, grammage values of the SliceSynthesis objects, and the thickness of the atmospheric slice when generating the CORSIKA input files. The reason for this is that the g/cm2 unit is an awkward value, which makes it difficult to work with, and most external packages that we use set the grammages in g/cm2 directly. As such, rather than adapting the internal unit system, we simply do not convert these values.