Thinned simulations of extremely energetic showers in dense media for radio applications

This paper presents our results for full 3-D simulations of very-high to ultra-high energy electromagnetic cascades - and the associated coherent Cherenkov radiation - as might be produced by high-energy neutrino interactions in dense media. Using "thinning" techniques, we develop an algorithm based on the existing "ZHS" code, and demonstrate that the new "ZHS-thinned" code can produce fast and accurate results for showers up to 10(20) eV. Using ZHS-thinned, we develop new parameterisations for the radiation from showers in ice, salt, and the lunar regolith, with a separate treatment of the megaregolith (deep regolith). Our parameterisations include for the first time a method to simulate fluctuations in shower length induced by the LPM effect. Our results, which avoid the pit-falls of scaling Simulations from lower energies, allow improved Calculations of the detection probability for experiments searching for high-energy neutrinos using the radio technique. (C) 2009 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.