Rigidity dependent knee and cosmic ray induced high energy neutrino fluxes

Abstract

Scenarios in which the knee of the cosmic ray spectrum depends on the particle rigidities usually predict that the cosmic ray composition becomes heavier above the knee and have associated a change in the spectral slope of each individual nuclear component which is steeper than the change ($\Delta \alpha \simeq 0.3$) observed in the total spectrum. We show that this implies that the very high energy ($E_{\nu }>10^{14}$ eV) diffuse neutrino fluxes produced by cosmic rays hitting the atmosphere or colliding with the interstellar medium in the Galaxy will be significantly suppressed, making their detection harder but also reducing the background for the search of other (more challenging) astrophysical neutrino sources.

20 pages, 5 figures

References in corpus (4)

• On the knee in the energy spectrum of cosmic rays
• Cosmic ray spectrum and anisotropies from the knee to the second knee
• Cosmic ray drift, the second knee and galactic anisotropies
• Measuring the prompt atmospheric neutrino flux with down-going muons in neutrino telescopes

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• A Combined Astrophysical and Dark Matter Interpretation of the IceCube HESE and Throughgoing Muon Events
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• Propagation of Extremely-high Energy Leptons in the Earth: Implications to their detection by the IceCube Neutrino Telescope
• IC at IC: IceCube can constrain the intrinsic charm of the proton
• Constraints to a Galactic Component of the Ice Cube cosmic neutrino flux from ANTARES
• Probing new physics with long-lived charged particles produced by atmospheric and astrophysical neutrinos
• Measuring diffuse neutrino fluxes with IceCube
• Detectable neutrino fluxes due to enhanced cosmic ray densities in the Galactic Center region
• Probing Very High Energy Prompt Muon and Neutrino fluxes and the cosmic ray knee via Underground Muons
• High Energy Astroparticle Physics