General Treatment of Reflection of Spherical Electromagnetic Waves from a Spherical Surface and its Implications for the ANITA Anomalous Polarity Events

Abstract: We develop a general formalism to treat reflection of spherical electromagnetic waves from a spherical surface. Our main objective is interpretation of radio wave signals produced by cosmic ray interactions with Earth's atmosphere which are observed by the Antarctica based ANITA detector after reflection off the ice surface. The incident wave is decomposed into plane waves and each plane wave is reflected off the surface using the standard Fresnel formalism. For each plane wave the reflected wave is assumed to be locally a plane wave. This is a very reasonable assumption and there are no uncontrolled approximations in our treatment of the reflection phenomenon. The surface roughness effects are also included by using a simple model. We apply our formalism to the radiation produced by the balloon-borne HiCal radio-frequency (RF) transmitter. Our final results for the reflected power are found to be in good agreement with data for all elevation angles. We also study the properties of reflected radio pulses in order to study their phase relationship with direct pulses. We find that for some roughness models the pulse shape can be somewhat distorted and may be misidentified as a direct pulse. However this is a rather small effect and is unable to provide an explanation for the observed mystery events by ANITA.