Atmospheric lepton fluxes at ultrahigh energies

Abstract

In order to estimate the possibility to observe exotic physics in a neutrino telescope, it is essential to first understand the flux of atmospheric neutrinos, muons and dimuons. We study the production of these leptons by high-energy cosmic rays. We identify three main sources of muons of energy E > 10^6 GeV: the weak decay of charm and bottom mesons and the electromagnetic decay of unflavored mesons. Contrary to the standard assumption, we find that eta mesons, not the prompt decay of charm hadrons, are the dominant source of atmospheric muons at these energies. We show that, as a consequence, the ratio between the neutrino and muon fluxes is significantly reduced. For dimuons, which may be a background for long-lived staus produced near a neutrino telescope, we find that pairs of E ~ 10^7 GeV forming an angle above 10^-6 rad are produced through D (80%) or B (10%) meson decay and through Drell-Yan proceses (10%). The frequency of all these processes has been evaluated using the jet code PYTHIA.

10 pages, 4 figures; published version

References in corpus (7)

• PYTHIA 6.4 Physics and Manual
• Prompt neutrino fluxes from atmospheric charm
• Determination of the Atmospheric Neutrino Fluxes from Atmospheric Neutrino Data
• Direct Detection of Supersymmetric Particles in Neutrino Telescopes
• Probing new physics with long-lived charged particles produced by atmospheric and astrophysical neutrinos
• Long-lived Staus from Cosmic Rays
• New physics from ultrahigh energy cosmic rays

Cited by in corpus (4)

• The Muon Puzzle in cosmic-ray induced air showers and its connection to the Large Hadron Collider
• Influence of hadronic interaction models and the cosmic ray spectrum on the high energy atmospheric muon and neutrino flux
• Propagation in the atmosphere of ultrahigh-energy charmed hadrons
• Atmospheric muons at PeV energies in radio neutrino detectors