FARSim: a fast RF-chain-aware trigger-screening surrogate for radio detection of ultra-high-energy cosmic rays

Abstract

Radio arrays provide a scalable route to detecting extensive air showers from ultra-high-energy cosmic rays, but trigger studies for candidate layouts are expensive when every energy, arrival direction, core position and trigger configuration is evaluated with full radio simulations. We present FARSim, a fast surrogate framework that reuses a reduced library of ZHAireS reference footprints to reconstruct ground-plane radio emission and to estimate trigger-relevant observables. The method combines vector geomagnetic and charge-excess field decomposition, geomagnetic-angle and energy scaling, geometrical projection, contour-based core sampling and event-rate integration. We validate the reconstructed field footprints and trigger regions against dedicated ZHAireS simulations, and quantify the computational gain obtained by replacing repeated full shower simulations with fast footprint queries. We further extend the peak-field surrogate to time-domain electric-field synthesis by combining the predicted three-component peak-field vector with geometry-dependent normalized pulse templates. Propagating these traces through an RF-chain response enables voltage-domain threshold and L1-trigger diagnostics. For the validation samples considered here, the time-domain extension reaches a median vector-waveform R^2 of 0.986 over 2112 held-out ZHAireS traces when tested at the true peak amplitude. FARSim is therefore intended as a rapid, physics-informed screening layer for array-layout and trigger studies; absolute exposure predictions and detector commissioning remain the role of full end-to-end simulations.