Mapping the dominant regions of the phase space associated with $c\bar{c}$ production relevant for the Prompt Atmospheric Neutrino Flux

Abstract

We present a detailed mapping of the dominant kinematical domains contributing to the prompt atmospheric neutrino flux at high neutrino energies by studying its sensitivity to the cuts on several kinematical variables crucial for charm production in cosmic ray scattering in the atmosphere. This includes the maximal center-of-mass energy for proton-proton scattering, the longitudinal momentum fractions of partons in the projectile (cosmic ray) and target (nucleus of the atmosphere), the Feynman $x_F$ variable and the transverse momentum of charm quark/antiquark. We find that the production of neutrinos with energies larger than $E_{\nu }>$ 10${}^7$ GeV is particularly sensitive to the center-of-mass energies larger than the ones at the LHC and to the longitudinal momentum fractions in the projectile 10${}^{-8}$ $<x<$ 10${}^{-5}$. Clearly, these are regions where we do not control the parton, in particular gluon, densities. We also analyse the characteristic theoretical uncertainties in the charm production cross section coming from its QCD modelling. The precision data on the prompt atmospheric neutrino flux can efficiently constrain the mechanism of heavy quark production and underlying QCD dynamics in kinematical ranges beyond the reach of the current collider measurements.

11 pages, 9 figures

References in corpus (15)

• Parton distributions in the LHC era: MMHT 2014 PDFs
• Observation and Characterization of a Cosmic Muon Neutrino Flux from the Northern Hemisphere using six years of IceCube data
• Calculation of atmospheric neutrino flux using the interaction model calibrated with atmospheric muon data
• Prompt neutrino fluxes from atmospheric charm
• Measurement of the atmospheric neutrino energy spectrum from 100 GeV to 400 TeV with IceCube
• IceCube: An Instrument for Neutrino Astronomy
• Perturbative charm production and the prompt atmospheric neutrino flux in light of RHIC and LHC
• Prompt atmospheric neutrino fluxes: perturbative QCD models and nuclear effects
• Measurement of the Atmospheric ${\nu }_e$ flux in IceCube
• Exclusive photoproduction of charmonia in $\gamma p\to Vp$ and $pp\to pVp$ reactions within $k_t$-factorization approach
• Exclusive heavy vector meson photoproduction in hadronic collisions at the LHC: predictions of the Color Glass Condensate model for Run 2 energies
• A new contribution to the conventional atmospheric neutrino flux
• Sharp knee phenomenon of primary cosmic ray energy spectrum
• Charm quark and meson production in association with single-jet at the LHC
• Drell-Yan process in $pA$ collisions: the exact treatment of coherence effects

Cited by in corpus (5)

• The Forward Physics Facility: Sites, Experiments, and Physics Potential
• Forward production of prompt neutrinos from charm in the atmosphere and at high energy colliders
• Impact of intrinsic charm amount in the nucleon and saturation effects on the prompt atmospheric ${\nu }_{\mu }$ flux for IceCube
• Depletion of atmospheric neutrino fluxes from parton energy loss
• Physics with high-luminosity proton-nucleus collisions at the LHC