# Atmospheric Neutrinos from Charm

## INTRODUCTION

Conventional lepton fluxes from $`\pi `$ and $`K`$ decays in the atmosphere are well known gaisser , but at energies of a few GeV charm-anticharm pairs can be produced and the leptons coming from charm decays, called prompt leptons, start to contribute to the atmospheric lepton fluxes. Results from several experiments frejus  show a muon excess relative to the conventional muon flux in the 10 TeV energy range that could be an indication of a charm contribution. Large volume water and ice neutrinos experiments amanda  are designed to search for muon neutrinos from extragalactic sources for which atmospheric muons and muon neutrinos represent the main background. Therefore it is important to determine the atmospheric lepton flux, including charm contributions, with better accuracy.

Atmospheric lepton fluxes from charm decays have been evaluated in the past using different models of charm production 8 ; others . We present a new calculation prs  based on next-to-leading order (NLO) perturbative QCD. We also investigate the importance of the small-$`x`$ behaviour of the parton distribution functions and study the uncertainties involved in the necessary extrapolation of cross sections and energy distributions beyond the experimentally measured regime.

## Lepton Flux Calculation

The lepton fluxes can be calculated semi-analytically using approximate cascade equations which begin with the incident cosmic ray flux. Details of this solution method can be found, for example, in Refs. lip ; prs . As in Ref. 8 , we assume that the incident cosmic ray flux can be represented by protons and that at the top of the atmosphere (X=0) the proton flux $`\varphi _p(E,X)`$ scales as $`1.7(E/\mathrm{GeV})^{2.7}`$ for $`E<510^6`$ GeV and scales as $`174(E/\mathrm{GeV})^3`$ for $`E510^6`$ GeV.

Production of charmed hadrons $`j`$ of energy $`E`$ by proton-air interactions enters into the calculation via the “$`Z`$-moment”, expressed in terms of an integral over $`x_E=E/E_p`$, which is given by

$$Z_{pj}=2f_j_0^1\frac{dx_E}{x_E}\frac{\varphi _p(E/x_E)}{\varphi _p(E)}\frac{1}{\sigma _{pA}(E)}\frac{d\sigma _{pAc\overline{c}}(E/x_E)}{dx_E},$$
(1)   
where $`f_j`$ is the fraction of charmed particles which emerge as hadron $`j`$ and the factor of two is taking into account the fact that we implicitly sum over particles and antiparticles. The quantity $`\sigma _{pA}(E)`$ is the total proton-air cross section mielke .

The charm production cross section and energy distribution depends on the value of the charm mass ($`m_c`$), the factorization scale ($`M`$) and renormalization scale ($`\mu `$) as well as the choice of parton distribution functions. Comparing the NLO total charm cross section nlo  with the experimental data from Ref. 13  led us to set $`m_c=1.3`$ GeV. We use the CTEQ3 15  and the MRSD- 16  parton distribution functions. We set our default factorization and renormalization scales to $`M=2\mu =2m_c`$. We also evaluate the lepton flux using the CTEQ3 parton distribution functions with $`M=\mu =m_c`$.

Because of the large computing time involved, we have used the NLO Monte Carlo program from Mangano, Nason and Ridolfi 14  to evaluate the appropriate rescaling factor $`K`$ that, applied to the “LO” energy distribution, correctly accounts for the NLO corrections. Here “LO” means taking the leading order matrix element squared, but using the two-loop $`\alpha _s(\mu ^2)`$ and the NLO parton distribution functions. The parametrization of $`K(E,x_E)`$ is given by the following expression

$`K(E,x_E)`$ $`=`$ $`1.36+0.42\mathrm{ln}(\mathrm{ln}(E/\mathrm{GeV}))`$   
$`+\left(3.40+18.7(E/\mathrm{GeV})^{0.43}0.079\mathrm{ln}(E/\mathrm{GeV})\right)x_E^{1.5}.`$   
The $`K`$-factor rescaled “LO” charm production distribution is used in Eq. (1) to obtain our lepton fluxes.

In Fig. 1 we show our results for the prompt atmospheric muon flux scaled by $`E^3`$ for two parton distributions and factorization scale choices. The highest flux at $`E=10^8`$ GeV is with the MRSD- distribution and $`M=2\mu =2m_c`$ (dashed). The CTEQ3 distributions with the same choice of scale are represented by the solid line, while the dot-dashed line shows the result when $`M=\mu =m_c`$. For reference, we show the vertical conventional and prompt muon flux calculated and parameterized by Thunman et al. in Ref. 8 . The prompt flux is isotropic. The prompt lepton flux evaluated using perturbative QCD can be parameterized as

$$\mathrm{log}_{10}\left(E^3\varphi _{\mathrm{}}(E)/(\mathrm{GeV}^2/\mathrm{cm}^2\mathrm{s}\mathrm{sr})\right)=A+Bx+Cx^2Dx^3,$$
(3)   
where $`x\mathrm{log}_{10}(E/\mathrm{GeV})`$. In Table I, we collect the constants for the MRSD- and CTEQ3 fluxes exhibited in Fig. 1. The prompt neutrino fluxes equal the prompt muon flux.

## Conclusions

We find that the perturbative charm contributions to lepton fluxes are significantly larger than the recent Thunman et al. calculation 8 . The prompt muon flux becomes larger than the conventional muon flux from pion and kaon decays at energies above $`10^5`$ GeV. We have evaluated the energy distribution at NLO in QCD, and we find that the NLO corrections give a correction of more than a factor of two which is weakly energy and $`x_E`$ dependent.

The main uncertainty in the perturbative calculation of the prompt flux, given fixed charm mass, factorization scale and renormalization scale, is the small-$`x`$ behavior of the parton distribution functions. The spread in predictions at $`E=10^8`$ GeV is indicative of this uncertainty.

We conclude that the prompt muon flux calculated in the context of perturbative QCD cannot explain the observed excess of muons in the TeV region frejus , independent of the theoretical uncertainties associated with small parton $`x`$. Measurements of the atmospheric flux in the 100 TeV range would help pin down the charm cross section at energies above those currently accessible using accelerators and would provide valuable information about the small-$`x`$ behavior of the gluon distribution function.

## Acknowledgements

Work supported in part by National Science Foundation Grant Nos. PHY-9507688 and PHY-9802403 and D.O.E. Contract No. DE-FG02-95ER40906.