A generalized description of the time dependent signals in extensive air shower detectors and its applications

The expected signal in extensive air shower (EAS) detectors can be predicted with a 10% accuracy by a parameterization that depends on a set of global shower parameters: the energy, the depth of the electromagnetic shower maximum (Xmax) and the overall muon content. By classifying shower particles in four components (muonic, purely electromagnetic, electromagnetic stemming from muon interactions and decay and electromagnetic-from-low-energy hadrons), shower-to-shower fluctuations are minimized. We follow this scheme to propose a model to describe the arrival time distributions of secondary particles as measured with surface detectors in an EAS experiment. This model is then used to reconstruct Xmax in Monte Carlo data sets. As an example, we show that for the case of the Pierre Auger Observatory Xmax can be reconstructed with an accuracy of about 45  g/cm2 at 1019 eV.