Abstract
We present predictions for the prompt-neutrino flux arising from the decay of charmed mesons and baryons produced by the interactions of high-energy cosmic rays in the Earth’s atmosphere, making use of a QCD approach on the basis of the general-mass variable-flavor-number scheme for the description of charm hadroproduction at NLO, complemented by a consistent set of fragmentation functions. We compare the theoretical results to those already obtained by our and other groups with different theoretical approaches. We provide comparisons with the experimental results obtained by the IceCube Collaboration in two different analyses and we discuss the implications for parton distribution functions.
Highlights
On the other hand, the lighter abundant mesons, i.e. charged pions and kaons, whose leptonic decays are sources of the so-called conventional neutrino flux, are characterized by larger decay lengths, suppressing their decays at large enough energies
We present predictions for the prompt-neutrino flux arising from the decay of charmed mesons and baryons produced by the interactions of high-energy cosmic rays in the Earth’s atmosphere, making use of a QCD approach on the basis of the generalmass variable-flavor-number scheme for the description of charm hadroproduction at next-to-leading order (NLO), complemented by a consistent set of fragmentation functions
Matrix elements for the hadroproduction of light and heavy partons are combined with a consistent set of fragmentation functions (FFs), which describe the transition from these partons to charmed hadrons
Summary
The evolution of particle fluxes in the atmosphere can be described by a system of coupled differential equations [5, 45,46,47,48,49], known as cascade equations, dφj(Ej, X) dX φj(Ej, X) λijnt(Ej ). [52], we consider the one (labeled in [52] as “WR-CRs (C/He=0.4) + EG-UFA”) with two galactic components, one produced in supernova remnants and the other produced by the explosion of Wolf-Rayet stars (with a Carbon/Helium ratio of 0.4), and an extra-galactic component according to the extra-galactic ankle model by Unger et al [53] This variant predicts the CR composition between the second knee and the ankle in good agreement with results from the Pierre Auger Collaboration [54]. We consider the broken-power-law allnucleon spectrum, φp(E, 0) = 1.7 (E/GeV)−2.7 cm−2s−1sr−1GeV−1 for E < 5 · 106 GeV and φp(E, 0) = 174 (E/GeV)−3 cm−2s−1sr−1GeV−1 for E > 5 · 106 GeV, introduced several years ago, as a reference spectrum for comparison with previous works, its highenergy part is nowadays known to overestimate the CR flux measured by Extended Air Shower experiments (EAS) Another input entering the Zph moments is the total inelastic p-Air cross section as a function of the collision energy.
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