Double Neutrino Production and Detection in Neutrino Detectors

Abstract

Large, high-energy ($E>100$ GeV) cosmic neutrino telescopes are now quite mature. IceCube, for example, observes about 50,000 well-reconstructed single atmospheric neutrino events/year, with energies above 100 GeV. Although the neutrino detection probability is small, current detectors are large enough so that it is possible to detect two neutrinos from the same cosmic-ray interaction. In this paper, we calculate the expected rate of double-neutrino interactions from a single cosmic-ray air shower. The rate is small, about 0.07 events/year for a 1 km${}^3$ detector like IceCube, with only a small dependence on the assumed cosmic-ray composition and hadronic interaction model. For a larger detector, like the proposed KM3Net, the rate is about 0.8 events/year, a rate that should be easily observable. These double neutrino interactions are the major irreducible background to searches of pairs of particles produced in supersymmetric neutrino or cosmic-ray air-shower interactions. Other standard-model backgrounds are considered, and found to be small.

6 pages with 5 figures

References in corpus (6)

• IceCube: An Instrument for Neutrino Astronomy
• Time-Integrated Searches for Point-like Sources of Neutrinos with the 40-String IceCube Detector
• Measurement of the Atmospheric ${\nu }_e$ flux in IceCube
• Direct Detection of Supersymmetric Particles in Neutrino Telescopes
• Direct Detection of Kaluza-Klein Particles in Neutrino Telescopes
• Reconstruction of Composite Events in Neutrino Telescopes

Cited by in corpus (6)

• Probing Particle Physics with IceCube
• Dimuons in Neutrino Telescopes: New Predictions and First Search in IceCube
• The IceCube Neutrino Observatory Part IV: Searches for Dark Matter and Exotic Particles
• Recent Highlights from IceCube
• The Forward Physics Facility at the High-Luminosity LHC
• Search for Charm-quark Production via Dimuons in Neutrino Telescopes