Prompt neutrinos from atmospheric charm in the general-mass variable-flavor-number scheme

Abstract

We present predictions for the prompt-neutrino flux arising from the decay of charmed mesons and baryons produced by the interactions of high-energy cosmic rays in the Earth's atmosphere, making use of a QCD approach on the basis of the generalmass variable-flavor-number scheme for the description of charm hadroproduction at NLO, complemented by a consistent set of fragmentation functions. We compare the theoretical results to those already obtained by our and other groups with different theoretical approaches. We provide comparisons with the experimental results obtained by the IceCube Collaboration in two different analyses and we discuss the implications for parton distribution functions.

Neutrino telescopes as QCD microscopes

“…See Refs. [43,46,47] for more details as well as a number of related studies [48][49][50][51][52][53][54].…”

Hadronic interaction model sibyll2.3cand inclusive lepton fluxes

“…In the following sections we scrutinize the calculations obtained from the combination MCEq + Sibyll-2.3c against the available reference models. [34], GRRST [56], PROSA [54] and GM-VNFS [33] are computed at NLO precision under different assumptions. They are accompanied by large error bands which are omitted for clarity.…”

Probing particle physics with IceCube

“…flavour scenario. In the most general case, the introduction of one sterile neutrino adds six new parameters to the neutrino oscillation phenomenology [152]: three mixing angles θ 14 , θ 24 , θ 34 , two CP-violating phases, δ 14 and δ 34 , and one mass difference, ∆m 2 41 , where the indexes '1-3' stand for the known neutrino mass states and '4' for the sterile state.…”