Towards the Calibration of Askaryan Radio Array (ARA) Station 1

The Askaryan Radio Array (ARA) is an ultra-highly neutrino detector based the on Askaryan effect that uses Antarctic ice as the detector medium. Its five autonomous station’s radio antennas (four strings of receiving antennas; each string consists of with 2 Vertically Polarized (VPol) & 2 Horizontally Polarized (HPol) receivers, & 2 strings of calibration antennas each with 1 VPol & 1 HPol channel) are deployed at a depth of 180-200 m, save for ARA station 1 (A1) which was deployed at 100 m owing to drilling difficulties. We apply various methods to calibrate the Ice Ray Sampler second generation (IRS2) chip of A1 for timing offset. We use a known continuous wave input signal to calibrate time base of the digitizer. After timing calibration to a precision of sub-nanoseconds, we find that odd samples behave better than even samples & that the HPols under-perform relative to the VPol channels. Our timing calibration data will be used to further calibrate the ADC-to-Voltage conversion for A1, as well as precise antenna locations, as a pre-cursor to vertex reconstruction. These calibrated data will then be analyzed for ultra-high energy neutrino signals in a final step of data compression. The calibrated analyzed data will then inform design of the planned IceCube Gen-2 radio array.