Nuclear effects in high-energy neutrino interactions

Abstract

Neutrino telescopes like IceCube, KM3NeT and Baikal-GVD offer physicists the opportunity to study neutrinos with energies far beyond the reach of terrestrial accelerators. These neutrinos are used to study high-energy neutrino interactions and to probe the Earth through absorption tomography. Current studies of TeV neutrinos use cross sections which are calculated for free nucleons with targets which are assumed to contain equal numbers of protons and neutrons. Here we consider modifications of high-energy neutrino interactions due to two nuclear effects: modifications of the parton densities in the nucleus, referred to here as shadowing, and the effect of non-isoscalar targets, with unequal numbers of neutrons and protons. Both these effects depend on the interaction medium. Because shadowing is larger for heavier nuclei, such as iron, found in the Earth's core, it introduces a zenith-angle dependent change in the absorption cross section. These modifications increase the cross sections by 1-2\% at energies below 100 TeV (antishadowing), and reduce it by 3-4\% at higher energies (shadowing). Nuclear effects also alter the inelasticity distribution of neutrino interactions in water/ice by increasing the number of low inelasticity interactions, with a larger effect for $\nu$ than $\bar{\nu }$. These effects are particularly large in the energy range below a few TeV. These effects could alter the cross sections inferred from events with tracks originating within the active detector volume as well as the ratio $\nu /\bar{\nu }$ inferred from inelasticity measurements. The uncertainties in these nuclear effects are larger than the uncertainties on the free-proton cross sections and will thus limit the systematic precision of future high-precision measurements at neutrino telescopes.

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Cited by in corpus (14)

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• Complete predictions for high-energy neutrino propagation in matter
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• Tau Neutrinos in the Next Decade: from GeV to EeV
• Measurement of the high-energy all-flavor neutrino-nucleon cross section with IceCube
• Reconstructing the neutrino energy for in-ice radio detectors
• High-energy neutrino deep inelastic scattering cross sections
• A search for an eV-scale sterile neutrino using improved high-energy ${\nu }_{\mu }$ event reconstruction in IceCube
• The flavor composition of ultra-high-energy cosmic neutrinos: measurement forecasts for in-ice radio-based EeV neutrino telescopes
• Implications of the QCD dynamics and a Super-Glashow astrophysical neutrino flux on the description of ultrahigh energy neutrino data
• Methods and stability tests associated with the sterile neutrino search using improved high-energy ${\nu }_{\mu }$ event reconstruction in IceCube
• Neutrino Interaction Physics in Neutrino Telescopes
• Measurement of the inelasticity distribution of neutrino-nucleon interactions for $80\mathbf{GeV}<{\mathbf{E}}_{\nu }<560\mathbf{GeV}$ with IceCube DeepCore