Enhancement and Suppression of the Neutrino-Nucleon Total Cross Section at Ultra-High Energies

Abstract

We argue that high gluon density effects at small $x$ are important for the calculation of ultra-high energy neutrino nucleon cross sections due to the phenomenon of geometric scaling. We calculate the cross section for $\nu N\to \mu X$, including high gluon density effects, using the all twist formalism of McLerran and Venugopalan and show that it can be related to the dipole nucleon cross section measured in DIS experiments. For neutrino energies of $E_{\nu }\sim 10^{12}$ GeV, the geometric scaling region extends all the way up to $Q^2\sim M_W^2$. We show that geometric scaling can lead to an {\it enhancement} of the neutrino nucleon total cross section by 1-2 orders of magnitude compared to the leading twist cross section and discuss the implications for neutrino observatories. At extremely high energies, gluon saturation effects suppress the neutrino nucleon total cross section and lead to its unitarization.

14 pages, 3 figures

References in corpus (5)

• Parton saturation and N_part scaling of semi--hard processes in QCD
• The Energy Dependence of the Saturation Momentum from RG Improved BFKL Evolution
• From DIS to proton-nucleus collisions in the Color Glass Condensate model
• A Gaussian effective theory for gluon saturation
• Dilepton production from the Color Glass Condensate

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• Geometric scaling in ultrahigh energy neutrinos and nonlinear perturbative QCD
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• DGLAP Evolutions and cross-sections of Neutrino-Nucleon interaction at Ultra High energy