7–11 Jul 2025
Niels Bohr Institute
Europe/Copenhagen timezone
May 29, 2025: Student talks now on timetable (subject to minor changes). Registration for online participation remains open.

Prompt atmospheric leptons and the potential role of intrinsic charm.

8 Jul 2025, 14:36
12m
Auditorium A (NBI)

Auditorium A

NBI

Speaker

Laksha Pradip Das (University of Iowa)

Description

The all-sky very-high energy ($10^4-10^6$ GeV) atmospheric muon flux is most recently measured by IceCube, where in the higher energy range, the spectrum hardens indicating a prompt component. IceCube also measures the atmospheric muon neutrino flux at high energy. Since this is dominated by the astrophysical flux, they are only able to set an upper bound on the prompt atmospheric muon neutrino flux contribution. We provide a new evaluation of the prompt atmospheric muon flux including for the first time an intrinsic charm component to colliding nucleons. This increases forward production of $\bar{D}^{0}$, $D^-$ and $\Lambda_c$ which decay into final states that can contain muons and muon neutrinos. We show how the increase in the prompt muon flux due to intrinsic charm has an associated increase in the prompt muon neutrino flux. We consider two models for intrinsic charm production, the models of Brodsky-Hoyer-Peterson-Sakai and Regge ansatz, that we implement in MCEq used for the calculation of the lepton fluxes. We discuss the challenges of obtaining predictions that are simultaneously consistent with both IceCube's high energy atmospheric muon flux measurements and their upper bound on the prompt muon neutrino flux. We quantify the discrepancies.

Primary author

Laksha Pradip Das (University of Iowa)

Presentation materials

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