Detector-level simulation closure of radio air-shower reconstruction with native RF-chain inversion and out-of-fold endpoint interpolation

Abstract

Autonomous radio arrays reconstruct air showers from trigger-selected digitized voltage traces rather than ideal electric-field footprints. We present a detector-level simulation-closure test linking RF-chain-triggered ZHAireS event packages to reconstructed direction, energy and quality diagnostics. Voltage amplitudes and station timing determine geometry through a robust joint timing--amplitude axis fit. Native-grid RF-chain inversion recovers 50--200 MHz electric-field peaks along the shower-plane v cross B axis. Symmetric four-arm iron and proton templates generated with 2 ns time bins provide endpoint estimates that are combined by a nested five-fold out-of-fold interpolation estimator. One estimator is used over the full angular range without a fitted multiplicative energy scale. Of 972 triggered event packages, 725 pass common quality selection in raw-noisy weighted, hard-gated denoised equal-weight and clean equal-weight branches. In the primary reconstructed-zenith range 60--85 degrees, 693 common events have mean energy residuals of -0.05, -0.30 and -0.66 percent with standard deviations of 11.04, 10.90 and 10.75 percent. The hard-gated denoised branch has a median angular separation of 0.052 degrees. Boundary zenith ranges are reported separately; the upper boundary has a mean energy residual of +14.2 percent and a 19.9 percent standard deviation. These results describe cross-fitted closure within a matched simulation framework, not deployed-array resolution or independent energy calibration.