Abstract
We re-evaluate the prompt atmospheric neutrino flux, using the measured charm cross sections at RHIC and the Large Hadron Collider to constrain perturbative QCD parameters such as the factorization and renormalization scales, as well as modern parton distribution functions and recent estimates of the cosmic-ray spectra. We find that our result for the prompt neutrino flux is lower than previous perturbative QCD estimates and, consequently, alters the signal-to-background statistics of the recent IceCube measurements at high energies.
Highlights
CcX), become an important component of the atmospheric neutrino flux at these high energies [18,19,20,21,22]
The computation of charm production in hadronic collisions introduces some of the biggest uncertainties that translate into the evaluation of the prompt flux
In this paper we focus on a new evaluation of the prompt flux using next-to-leading order (NLO) QCD
Summary
[37], and a combination of fixed target, PHENIX, and STAR charm production cross sections, they find that MF/mc = 1.3–4.3 and μR/mc = 1.7–1.5 with MF = 2.1mc and μR = 1.6mc as central values We use these values of parameters as a guide to the range of theoretical NLO charm cross sections expected at high energies. The cross sections shown in figure 1 for proton interactions with the iso-scalar nucleon pN → ccX are obtained using factorization and renormalization scales relative to the charmed quark transverse mass m2T ≡ (m2c + p2T) rather than relative to the charm quark mass mc.
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