Tau Appearance In Atmospheric Neutrino Interactions

Abstract

If the correct interpretation of the Super-Kamiokande atmospheric neutrino data is ν_μ-> ν_τoscillation, the contained data sample should already have more than 10 tau appearance events. We study the challenging task of detecting the tau, focussing on the decay chain τ^\pm -> ρ^\pm -> π^\pm π^0 in events with quasi-elastic tau production. The background level, which is currently quite uncertain because of a lack of relevant neutral current data, can be measured by the near detector in the K2K experiment. Our estimates of the background suggest that it may be possible to detect tau appearance in Super-Kamiokande with 5-10 years of running.

13 pages, uses psfig

References in corpus (2)

• Initial Results from the CHOOZ Long Baseline Reactor Neutrino Oscillation Experiment
• Measurement of the atmospheric neutrino-induced upgoing muon flux using MACRO

Cited by in corpus (7)

• Neutrino Interactions In Oscillation Experiments
• Long Baseline Neutrino Physics with a Muon Storage Ring Neutrino Source
• Tau Polarization in Tau-Neutrino Nucleon Scattering
• Is neutrino decay really ruled out as a solution to the atmospheric neutrino problem from Super-Kamiokande data?
• Neutral-Current Atmospheric Neutrino Flux Measurement Using Neutrino-Proton Elastic Scattering in Super-Kamiokande
• On the Optimum Long Baseline for the Next Generation Neutrino Oscillation Experiments
• GeV to TeV astrophysical tau neutrinos