Galactic calibration and its long-term stability for the Auger Engineering Radio Array

The Auger Engineering Radio Array (AERA), part of the Pierre Auger Observatory, is a facility designed to detect radio emissions from extensive air showers at high energies. Consisting of 153 autonomous radio-detector stations spread over 17 km ², it detects radio waves in the frequency range of 30 to 80 MHz. Accurate characterization of the detector response is essential for correct data interpretation, previously achieved through laboratory measurements of the analog chain and measurements of the antenna’s directional response. In this study, we perform an absolute calibration using the continuously monitored sidereal modulation of the diffuse Galactic radio emission. Calibration is done by comparing the average spectra recorded by the stations with seven different models of the full radio sky propagated through the system response, including antennas, filters, and amplifiers. The Galactic calibration is in good agreement with the original laboratory calibration. In addition, we analyze the time-dependence of the calibration constants over a period of seven years. No aging effects are observed in AERA stations over a timescale of a decade, which shows that radio detectors could help monitor possible aging effects of other detector systems during long-term operations and highlight their importance in determining an absolute cosmic-ray energy scale.