We re-examine the charm contribution to atmospheric lepton fluxes in the context of perturbative QCD. We include next-to-leading order corrections and discuss theoretical uncertainties due to the extrapolations of the gluon distributions at small-x. We show that the charm contribution to the atmospheric muon flux becomes dominant over the conventional contribution from π and K decays at the energies of about 10 5 GeV. We compare our fluxes with previous calculations.

We calculate single pion production by neutrinos in the resonance region. We consider both charged and neutral current reactions on free protons and neutrons. We present differential and total cross sections which can be compared with experiments. Then we use these results to calculate the spectra of the emerging pions including the Pauli suppression factor and rescattering corrections for reactions in heavy nuclei. Our results will be useful for studying single pion production and for investigating neutrino oscillations in future experiments.

We present an evaluation of the atmospheric tau neutrino flux in the energy range between $10^2$ and $10^6$ GeV. The main source of tau neutrinos is from charmed particle production and decay. The $\nu_\tau N\to \tau X$ event rate for a detector with a water equivalent volume of 1 km$^3$ is on the order of 60-100 events per year for $E_\tau>100$ GeV, reducing to 18 events above 1 TeV. Event rates for atmospheric muon neutrino oscillations to tau neutrinos are also evaluated.Comment: 8 pages, 1 figur

We present a calculation of the fluxes of muons and muon neutrinos from the decays of pions and kaons that are themselves the decay products of charmed particles produced in the atmosphere by cosmic ray-air collisions. Using the perturbative cross section for charm production, these lepton fluxes are two to three orders of magnitude smaller than the fluxes from the decays of pions and kaons directly produced in cosmic ray-air collisions. Intrinsic charm models do not significantly alter our conclusions, nor do models with a charm cross section enhanced in the region above an incident cosmic ray energy of 1 TeV.

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