Weak boson effects in charged current neutrino and antineutrino interactions at very high (DUMAND) energies. [1 to 100 TeV, quark-parton model, Weinberg-Salam gauge model

Abstract

The charged current neutrino and antineutrino total cross sections and y-distributions at very high energies (1 to 100 TeV) using the standard quark-parton model have been calculated. A range of W boson masses was considered which includes the value in the Weinberg-Salam model. The parametrization of the quark structure functions was chosen to fit the highest energy data available (100 to 200 GeV) so that scaling violations could be neglected. The W boson propagator causes the total cross sections to turn over and enhances the y-distributions at small y for high energies. It was shown that the presence of an admixture of antineutrinos in the flux as large as 25% does not mask the effect of the W boson propagator on the neutrino cross section or on the neutrino y-distribution. The expected flux spectrum of atmospheric neutrinos was folded in and counting rates per bin over a range of intervals in E/sub ..nu../ and y were computed for a 1 km/sup 3/ (10/sup 9/ ton) DUMAND array. It was also found that a 25% admixture of antineutrinos in the flux did not appreciably affect these counting rates.