A dual-polarization whitened-template trigger for real-time radio detection of extensive air showers

Abstract

Autonomous radio stations require a first-stage trigger that rejects measured background while preserving weak extensive-air-shower pulses under tight hardware constraints. We present a dual-polarization trigger based on a 16-sample whitened pulse template evaluated continuously on the orthogonal north-south and east-west channels of an Auger Engineering Radio Array station. The template is derived from detector-folded air-shower pulses and whitened using the covariance of measured background. Responses from both polarizations are combined within a fixed timing radius and compared with a calibrated threshold. On an independent test set, the trigger reaches an efficiency of 0.97, with a 95 percent confidence interval of 0.96 to 0.98, at a frame-equivalent candidate rate of 3.39 kHz. At the same operating point, an unwhitened dual-polarization template reaches 0.41 efficiency and an amplitude trigger reaches 0.16. Efficiency remains at least 0.94 in every populated signal-to-noise bin. Replay of 159.29 ms of continuous measured background yields a score-cluster rate of 6.64 kHz, below the 71.4 kHz capacity of the downstream module. The FPGA implementation accepts one dual-polarization sample per clock, closes timing at 200 MHz, and uses 2377 lookup tables, 5330 registers, and 32 digital signal-processing blocks. Register-transfer-level simulation agrees bit for bit with the reference implementation for 400 traces. These results show that background covariance, pulse morphology, and dual-polarization consistency can be combined in a compact real-time radio trigger.