Uncertainties in Atmospheric Muon-Neutrino Fluxes Arising from Cosmic-Ray Primaries

Abstract

We present an updated calculation of the uncertainties on the atmospheric muon-neutrino flux arising from cosmic-ray primaries. For the first time, we include recent measurements of the cosmic-ray primaries collected since 2005. We apply a statistical technique that allows the determination of correlations between the parameters of the GSHL primary-flux parametrisation and the incorporation of these correlations into the uncertainty on the muon-neutrino flux. We obtain an uncertainty related to the primary cosmic rays of around $(5\text{–}15)\%$, depending on energy, which is about a factor of two smaller than the previously determined uncertainty. The hadron production uncertainty is added in quadrature to obtain the total uncertainty on the neutrino flux, which is reduced by $\approx 5\%$. To take into account an unexpected hardening of the spectrum of primaries above energies of $100$ $\text{GeV}$ observed in recent measurements, we propose an alternative parametrisation and discuss its impact on the neutrino flux uncertainties.

References in corpus (5)

• Cosmic-Ray Proton and Helium Spectra from the First CREAM Flight
• Measurements of 0.2 to 20 GeV/n cosmic-ray proton and helium spectra from 1997 through 2002 with the BESS spectrometer
• Uncertainties in Atmospheric Neutrino Fluxes
• Determining neutrino oscillation parameters from atmospheric muon neutrino disappearance with three years of IceCube DeepCore data
• Sharp knee phenomenon of primary cosmic ray energy spectrum

Cited by in corpus (2)

• Measurement of Atmospheric Tau Neutrino Appearance with IceCube DeepCore
• Light, Unstable Sterile Neutrinos: Phenomenology, a Search in the IceCube Experiment, and a Global Picture