Atmospheric lepton fluxes at very high energy

التفاصيل البيبلوغرافية
العنوان: Atmospheric lepton fluxes at very high energy
المؤلفون: Illana, J. I., Lipari, Paolo, Masip, M., Meloni, D.
سنة النشر: 2010
المجموعة: Astrophysics
High Energy Physics - Phenomenology
مصطلحات موضوعية: Astrophysics - High Energy Astrophysical Phenomena, High Energy Physics - Phenomenology
الوصف: The observation of astrophysical neutrinos requires a detailed understanding of the atmospheric neutrino background. Since neutrinos are produced in meson decays together with a charged lepton, important constraints on this background can be obtained from the measurement of the atmospheric muon flux. Muons, however, can also be produced as mu+ mu- pairs by purely electromagnetic processes. We use the Z-moment method to study and compare the contributions to the atmospheric muon and neutrino fluxes from different sources (pi/K decay, charmed and unflavored hadron decay, and photon conversion into a muon pair). We pay special attention to the contribution from unflavored mesons (eta, eta', rho0, omega and phi). These mesons are abundant in air showers, their lifetimes are much shorter than those of charged pions or kaons, and they have decay branching ratios of order 10^-4 into final states containing a muon pair. We show that they may be the dominant source of muons at E_mu >10^3 TeV.
Comment: Pdflatex, 28 pages, 6 figures
نوع الوثيقة: Working Paper
DOI: 10.1016/j.astropartphys.2011.01.001
URL الوصول: http://arxiv.org/abs/1010.5084
رقم الانضمام: edsarx.1010.5084
قاعدة البيانات: arXiv
الوصف
DOI:10.1016/j.astropartphys.2011.01.001