Production and propagation of heavy hadrons in air-shower simulators

Abstract

Very energetic charm and bottom hadrons may be produced in the upper atmosphere when a primary cosmic ray or the leading hadron in an extensive air shower collide with a nucleon. At $E\approx 10^8$ GeV their decay length becomes of the order of 10 km, implying that they tend to interact in the air instead of decaying. Since the inelasticity in these collisions is much smaller than the one in proton and pion collisions, there could be rare events where a heavy-hadron component transports a significant amount of energy deep into the atmosphere. We have developed a module for the detailed simulation of these processes and have included it in a new version of the air shower simulator AIRES. We study the frequency, the energy distribution and the depth of charm and bottom production, as well as the depth and the energy distribution of these quarks when they decay. As an illustration, we consider the production and decay of tau leptons (from $D_s$ decays) and the lepton flux at PeV energies from a 30 EeV proton primary. The proper inclusion of charm and bottom hadrons in AIRES opens the possibility to search for air-shower observables that are sensitive to heavy quark effects.

Accepted for publication in Astroparticle Physics

References in corpus (7)

• Prompt neutrino fluxes from atmospheric charm
• Measurement of the cosmic ray energy spectrum using hybrid events of the Pierre Auger Observatory
• Long-Lived Staus at Neutrino Telescopes
• Charm Production in DPMJET
• Long-lived Staus from Cosmic Rays
• Hunting long-lived gluinos at the Pierre Auger Observatory
• Propagation in the atmosphere of ultrahigh-energy charmed hadrons

Cited by in corpus (3)

• Heavy Quark Production in Ultra High Energy Cosmic Ray Interactions
• Neutrino events within muon bundles at neutrino telescopes
• Longitudinal profiles of Extensive Air Showers with inclusion of charm and bottom particles