Final state radiation from high and ultrahigh energy neutrino interactions
Abstract
Charged leptons produced by high-energy and ultrahigh-energy neutrinos have a substantial probability of emitting prompt internal bremsstrahlung 𝜈ℓ+𝑁→ℓ+𝑋+𝛾. This can have important consequences for neutrino detection. We discuss observable consequences at high- and ultrahigh-energy neutrino telescopes and the Large Hadron Collider’s (LHC’s) Forward Physics Facility. Logarithmic enhancements can be substantial (e.g., ∼20%) when either the charged lepton’s energy or the rest of the cascade is measured. We comment on final state radiation’s impacts on measuring the inelasticity distribution, 𝜈/¯𝜈 flux ratio, throughgoing muons, and double-bang signatures for high-energy neutrino observation. Furthermore, for ultrahigh-energy neutrino observation, we find that final state radiation increases the overall detectable energy by as much as 20%, affects flavor measurements, and decreases the energy of both Earth-emergent tau leptons and regenerated tau neutrinos. Many of these have significant impacts on measuring neutrino fluxes and spectra. Finally, for the LHC’s Forward Physics Facility, we find that final state radiation will impact future extractions of strange quark parton distribution functions. Final state radiation should be included in future analyses at neutrino telescopes and the Forward Physics Facility.
Copyright and License
Published by the American Physical Society under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International license. Further distribution of this work must maintain attribution to the author(s) and the published article’s title, journal citation, and DOI. Funded by SCOAP3.
Acknowledgement
The realistic inelasticity distributions of neutrino deep-inelastic scattering [55] in this paper were provided to us by Keping Xie, and the atmospheric neutrino flux data were provided to us by Qinrui Liu; we thank both of them for their help. We are very grateful to John Beacom for discussions, encouragement, and critical feedback on early versions of this work. We thank Kevin McFarland for useful comments about hadronic cascades in nuclear emulsion detectors. We thank Brian Batell, Mauricio Bustamante, John Campbell, Richard Hill, Keith McBride, Lu Lu, Michele Papucci, Mary Hall Reno, Alfonso Garcia-Soto, Christoph Welling, and Tianlu Yuan for helpful discussions. We thank Mauricio Bustamante, Patrick J. Fox, Francis Halzen, and Spencer Klein for their feedback and comments on the manuscript. R. P. is supported by the Neutrino Theory Network under Award Number DEAC02-07CH11359, the U.S. Department of Energy, Office of Science, Office of High Energy Physics, under Award Number DE-SC0011632, and by the Walter Burke Institute for Theoretical Physics. B. Z. is supported by Fermilab, which is managed by the Fermi Research Alliance, LLC, acting under Contract No. DE-AC02-07CH11359.
Files
Name | Size | Download all |
---|---|---|
md5:de11417a62c0c94bc5b9d54e75d0fab9
|
667.1 kB | Preview Download |
Additional details
- United States Department of Energy
- DEAC02-07CH11359
- United States Department of Energy
- DE-SC0011632
- Walter Burke Institute for Theoretical Physics
- United States Department of Energy
- Fermilab DE-AC02-07CH11359
- SCOAP3
- Accepted
-
2025-01-03Accepted
- Caltech groups
- Walter Burke Institute for Theoretical Physics
- Publication Status
- Published