https://doi.org/10.1051/epjconf/20159905002
Atmospheric lepton fluxes
Bartol Research Institute, Department of Physics and Astronomy, University of Delaware, Newark, DE 19716, USA
a e-mail: gaisser@bartol.udel.edu
Published online: 3 August 2015
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 νμ and νe are discussed, along with the implications of the muon charge ratio for the νµ / ν̅µ 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.
© Owned by the authors, published by EDP Sciences, 2015
This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License 4.0, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.
