Tau neutrino deep inelastic charged current interactions

Abstract

The nu_mu -> nu_tau oscillation hypothesis will be tested through nu_tau production of tau in underground neutrino telescopes as well as long-baseline experiments. We provide the full QCD framework for the evaluation of tau neutrino deep inelastic charged current (CC) cross sections, including next-leading-order (NLO) corrections, charm production, tau threshold, and target mass effects in the collinear approximation. We investigate the violation of the Albright-Jarlskog relations for the structure functions F_4,5 which occur only in heavy lepton (tau) scattering. Integrated CC cross sections are evaluated naively over the full phase space and with the inclusion of DIS kinematic cuts. Uncertainties in our evaluation based on scale dependence, PDF errors and the interplay between kinematic and dynamical power corrections are discussed and/or quantified.Comment: 28 pages, 10 figure