238 research outputs found
Atmospheric Lepton Fluxes
This review of atmospheric muons and neutrinos emphasizes the high energy
range relevant for backgrounds to high-energy neutrinos of astrophysical
origin. After a brief historical introduction, the main distinguishing features
of atmospheric and are discussed, along with the implications
of the muon charge ratio for the ratio. Methods to
account for effects of the knee in the primary cosmic-ray spectrum and the
energy-dependence of hadronic interactions on the neutrino fluxes are discussed
and illustrated in the context of recent results from IceCube. A simple
numerical/analytic method is proposed for systematic investigation of
uncertainties in neutrino fluxes arising from uncertainties in the primary
cosmic-ray spectrum/composition and hadronic interactions.Comment: 8 pages, 6 figures, for Proceedings of ISVHECRI 2014 This revised
version corrects a typo in Eq. 11. There are no changes in the results (the
typo was only in the LaTeX, not in the code
Atmospheric leptons, the search for a prompt component
The flux of high-energy (>GeV) neutrinos consists primarily of those produced
by cosmic-ray interactions in the atmosphere. The contribution from
extraterrestrial sources is still unknown. Current limits suggest that the
observed spectrum is dominated by atmospheric neutrinos up to at least 100 TeV.
The contribution of charmed hadrons to the flux of atmospheric neutrinos is
important in the context of the search for astrophysical neutrinos because the
spectrum of such "prompt" neutrinos is harder than that of "conventional"
neutrinos from decay of pions and kaons. The prompt component therefore becomes
increasingly important as energy increases. This paper reviews the status of
the search for prompt muons and neutrinos with emphasis on the complementary
aspects of muons, electron neutrinos and muon neutrinos
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