The vertical sea-level muon spectrum at energies above 1 GeV and the muon intensities at depths up to 18 km w.e. in different rocks and in water are calculated. The results are particularly collated with a great body of the ground-level, underground, and underwater muon data. In the hadron-cascade calculations, we take into account the logarithmic growth with energy of inelastic cross sections and pion, kaon, and nucleon generation in pion-nucleus collisions. For evaluating the prompt muon contribution to the muon flux, we apply the two phenomenological approaches to the charm production problem: the recombination quark-parton model and the quark-gluon string model. We give simple fitting formulas describing our numerical results. To solve the muon transport equation at large depths of a homogeneous medium, we use a semianalytical method, which allows the inclusion of an arbitrary (decreasing) muon spectrum at the medium boundary and real energy dependence of muon energy losses. Our analysis shows that at the depths up to 6-7 km w.e., essentially all underground data on the muon flux correlate with each other and with the predicted one for conventional (π, K)-muons, to within 10 %. However, the high-energy sea-level muon data as well as the data at high depths are contradictory and cannot be quantitatively described by a single nuclear-cascade model.

Abstract.We present a covariant wave-packet approach to neutrino flavor transitions in vacuum. The approach is based on the technique of macroscopic Feynman diagrams describing the lepton number violating processes of production and absorption of virtual massive neutrinos at the macroscopically separated spacetime regions ("source" and "detector"). Accordingly, the flavor transitions are a result of interference of the diagrams with neutrinos of different masses in the intermediate states. The statistically averaged probability of the process is representable as a multidimensional integral of the product of the factors which describe the differential flux density of massless neutrinos from the source, differential cross section of the neutrino interaction with the detector and a dimensionless factor responsible for the flavor transition. The conditions are analyzed under which the last factor can be treated as the flavor transition probability in the usual quantum mechanical sense.

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Abstract. We analyse available experimental data on the total and differential charged-current cross sections for quasielastic νµN and νµN scattering, obtained with a variety of nuclear targets in the accelerator experiments at ANL, BNL, FNAL, CERN, and IHEP, dating from the end of sixties to the present day. The data are used to adjust the poorly known value of the axial-vector mass of the nucleon.