Dimuon events induced by charm-quark productions from neutrino deep inelastic scattering (DIS) processes have been studied in traditional DIS experiments for decades. The recent progress in neutrino telescopes makes it possible to search such dimuon events at energies far beyond laboratory scale. In this paper, we construct a simulation framework to calculate yields and distributions of dimuon signals in an IceCube-like km3 scale neutrino telescope. Due to experimental limitation in the resolution of double-track lateral distance, only dimuon produced outside the detector volume are considered. Detailed information about simulation results for ten years exposure is demonstrated. Both an earlier work [1] and our work study a similar situation, we therefore use that paper as a baseline to conduct comparisons. We then estimate the impacts of different calculation methods of muon energy losses, and find that, the average energy loss formula used in that work results in more events by contrast with Monte Carlo simulation. Finally, we study the experimental potential of dimuon searches under the hypothesis of single-muon background-only. Our results based on a simplified double-track reconstruction indicate a moderate sensitivity especially with the ORCA configuration. Further developments on both the reconstruction algorithm and possible detector designs are thus required, and are under investigation.
Finite temperature QCD sum rules are applied to the behaviour of charmonium and bottonium states, leading to their survival at and beyond the critical temperature for deconfinement. Di-muon production in heavy-ion collisions in the $ρ$-region is also discussed.
Neutrino telescopes allow powerful probes of high-energy astrophysics and particle physics. Their power is increased when they can isolate different event classes, e.g., by flavor, though that is not the only possibility. Here we focus on a new event class for neutrino telescopes: dimuons, two energetic muons from one neutrino interaction. We make new theoretical and observational contributions. For the theoretical part, we calculate dimuon-production cross sections and detection prospects via deep-inelastic scattering (DIS; where we greatly improve upon prior work) and $W$-boson production (W…
CERN collaboration NA50 has measured charmonium and Drell-Yan dimuon production in Pb+Pb collisions. Parton scattering broadens the transverse momentum, p_T, distributions for these processes. We predict that the average p_T^{2} will flatten in Pb+Pb collisions as a function of the neutral transverse energy of hadrons, E_T, in contrast to the almost-linear rise seen in S+U - psi +X. If seen, such a flattening will support hadronic explanations of charmonium suppression. Figures 2 and 5 are improved and numerous typographical errors are corrected.
We study the dimuon yield from open charm decays in the intermediate mass region(IMR) in heavy-ion collisions at the CERN-SPS energy. We find that final state rescatterings which broaden the $m_T$ spectrum of charmed mesons can enrich the part of the phase space covered by the NA50 experiment, thus leading to an apparent enhancement of IMR dileptons within the acceptance of the experiment. Such an enhancement increases with the dimuon invariant mass and the single muon energy cut-off.
We present a fully differential next-to-next-to-leading order calculation of charm quark production in charged-current deep-inelastic scattering, with full charm-quark mass dependence. The next-to-next-to-leading order corrections in perturbative quantum chromodynamics are found to be comparable in size to the next-to-leading order corrections in certain kinematic regions. We compare our predictions with data on dimuon production in (anti-)neutrino scattering from a heavy nucleus. Our results can be used to improve the extraction of the parton distribution function of a strange quark in the nu…
Neutrino induced deep inelastic charm production off strange sea partons in the nucleon is studied in the framework of the MSbar fixed flavor factorization scheme. The momentum (z) distributions of the produced D mesons as calculated in the next-to-leading order QCD analysis are presented and compared to their leading order counterparts. Perturbative stability within this formalism is demonstrated and the compatibility of recent next-to-leading order (NLO) strange quark distributions with available dimuon data is investigated. Our NLO (MSbar) results provide, for the first time, the tools requ…
Experimental analyses of charged current deep inelastic charm production -- as observed through dimuon events in neutrino-iron scattering -- measure the strangeness component of the nucleon sea. A complete analysis requires a Monte Carlo simulation to account for experimental detector acceptance effects; therefore, a fully differential theoretical calculation is necessary to provide complete kinematic information. We investigate the theoretical issues involved in calculating these differential distributions at Next-Leading-Order (NLO). Numerical results are presented for typical fixed target k…
The asymmetry of $D^-$ and $D^+$ meson production in $π^-N$ scattering observed by the E791 experiment is a typical phenomenon known as the leading particle effect in charm hadroproducton. We show that the phenomenon can be explained by the effect of light quark fragmentation into charmed hadrons (LQF). Meanwhile, the size of the LQF effect is estimated from data of the E791 experiment. A comparison is made with the estimate of the LQF effect from prompt like-sign dimuon rate in neutrino experiments. The influence of the LQF effect on the measurement of nucleon strange distribution asymmetry f…
Interest in the strange nucleon sea has been renewed when it was realized that the strangeness asymmetry $s^-=s-\bar{s}$ plays a prominent role in the interpretation of the NuTeV weak mixing angle anomaly. I review the NLO QCD calculation of the neutrino-production of opposite-sign dimuons as the experimental signature of the strange quark parton density. Results from a recent CTEQ fit are presented and discussed with respect to their stability under NLO corrections and their impact on the NuTeV measurement.
We present an analysis of the nucleon strange sea extracted from a global Parton Distribution Function fit including the neutrino and anti-neutrino dimuon data by the CCFR and NuTeV collaborations, the inclusive charged lepton-nucleon Deep Inelastic Scattering and Drell-Yan data. The (anti-)neutrino induced dimuon analysis is constrained by the semi-leptonic charmed-hadron branching ratio $B_μ=(8.8\pm0.5)%$, determined from the inclusive charmed hadron measurements performed by the FNAL-E531 and CHORUS neutrino emulsion experiments. Our analysis yields a strange sea suppression factor $κ(Q^2=2…
We present details on calculation of next-to-next-to-leading order QCD corrections to massive charged-current coefficient functions in deep-inelastic scattering. Especially we focus on the application to charm-quark production in neutrino scattering on fixed target that can be measured via the dimuon final state. We construct a fast interface to the calculation so for any parton distributions the cross sections can be evaluated within milliseconds by using the pre-generated interpolation grids. We discuss agreements of various theoretical predicitons with the NuTeV and CCFR dimuon data and the…
In order to estimate the possibility to observe exotic physics in a neutrino telescope, it is essential to first understand the flux of atmospheric neutrinos, muons and dimuons. We study the production of these leptons by high-energy cosmic rays. We identify three main sources of muons of energy E > 10^6 GeV: the weak decay of charm and bottom mesons and the electromagnetic decay of unflavored mesons. Contrary to the standard assumption, we find that eta mesons, not the prompt decay of charm hadrons, are the dominant source of atmospheric muons at these energies. We show that, as a consequence…
We discuss the two most recent global analyses of nuclear parton distribution functions within the nCTEQ approach. LHC data on $W/Z$-boson, single-inclusive hadron and heavy quark/quarkonium production are shown to not only significantly reduce the gluon uncertainty down to $x\geq10^{-5}$, but to also influence the strange quark density. The latter is further constrained by neutrino deep-inelastic scattering and charm dimuon production data, whose consistency with neutral-current experiments is also re-evaluated.
A search for Secluded Dark Matter annihilation in the Sun using 2007-2012 data of the ANTARES neutrino telescope is presented. Three different cases are considered: a) detection of dimuons that result from the decay of the mediator, or neutrino detection from: b) mediator that decays into a dimuon and, in turn, into neutrinos, and c) mediator that decays directly into neutrinos. As no significant excess over background is observed, constraints are derived on the dark matter mass and the lifetime of the mediator.
Threshold enhancements predicted by the Resonance-Spectrum-Expansion (RSE) production amplitude and observed by the BaBaR Collaboration in open-bottom production above the $B\bar{B}$ threshold, as well as by several collaborations in open-charm production above the $D\bar{D}$ threshold, can also be seen in diphoton amplitudes at energies above 100 GeV. One such threshold effect is visible in tau-tau and muon-muon data of the L3 Collaboration at LEP, and in the diphoton and four-lepton data of the ATLAS and CMS Collaborations at LHC, as it is enhanced by the nearby presence of the Higgs resonan…
We review the constraints on the small-x gluon PDF that can be derived by exploiting the forward D meson production data from the LHCb experiment at $\sqrt{s}=5,7$ and 13 TeV. We then discuss the phenomenological implications of the resulting improved small-x gluon for ultra-high energy astrophysics, in particular neutrino telescopes, as well as for the proposed Future Circular Collider (FCC) with $\sqrt{s}=100$ TeV. We illustrate how at the FCC even electroweak scale cross-sections can become sensitive to the small-x region of the quark and gluon PDFs, and then demonstrate how the addition of…
Prompt neutrino fluxes are basic backgrounds in the search of high-energy neutrinos of astrophysical origin, performed by means of full-size neutrino telescopes located at Earth, under ice or under water. Predictions for these fluxes are provided on the basis of up-to-date theoretical results for charm hadroproduction in perturbative QCD, together with a comprehensive discussion of the various sources of theoretical uncertainty affecting their computation, and a quantitative estimate of each uncertainty contribution.
The recent observation by the IceCube experiment of cosmic neutrinos at energies up to a few PeV heralds the beginning of neutrino astronomy. At such high energies, the conventional neutrino flux is suppressed and the prompt component from charm meson decays is expected to become the dominant background to astrophysical neutrinos. Charm production at high energies is however theoretically uncertain, both since the charm mass is at the boundary of applicability of perturbative QCD, and also because the calculations are sensitive to the poorly-known gluon PDF at small-x. In this work we provide …
We compute deep-sea energy spectra and zenith-angle distributions of the atmospheric muons, both conventional and prompt. The prompt muon contribution to the muon flux underwater is calculated taking into consideration predictions of recent charm production models in which probed is the small-x behavior of the gluon distribution inside of a nucleon. We argue for a possibility to discriminate the PQCD models of the charm production differing in the slope of the gluon distribution, in measurements with neutrino telescopes of the muon flux at energies 10-100 TeV.
We analyze the possibility that neutrino telescopes may provide an experimental determination of the slope lambda of the gluon distribution in the proton at momentum fractions x smaller than the accelerator reach. The method is based on a linear relation between lambda and the spectral index (slope) of the down-going atmospheric muon flux above 100 TeV, for which there is no background. Considering the uncertainties in the charm production cross section and in the cosmic ray composition, we estimate the error on the measurement of lambda through this method, excluding the experimental error of…
We present high energy spectra and zenith-angle distributions of the atmospheric muons computed for the depths of the locations of the underwater neutrino telescopes. We compare the calculations with the data obtained in the Baikal and the AMANDA muon experiments. The prompt muon contribution to the muon flux underwater due to recent perturbative QCD-based models of the charm production is expected to be observable at depths of the large underwater neutrino telescopes. This appears to be probable even at rather shallow depths (1-2 km), provided that the energy threshold for muon detection is r…
The atmospheric neutrino flux includes a component from the prompt decay of charmed hadrons that becomes significant only at $E\ge 10$ TeV. At these energies, however, the diffuse flux of cosmic neutrinos discovered by IceCube seems to be larger than the atmospheric one. Here we study the possibility to detect a neutrino interaction in down-going atmospheric events at km$^3$ telescopes. The neutrino signal will always appear together with a muon bundle that reveals its atmospheric origin and, generically, it implies an increase in the detector activity with the slant depth. We propose a simple…
Energy spectra and zenith angle distributions of atmospheric muons are calculated for the depths of operation of large underwater neutrino telescopes. The estimation of the prompt muon contribution is performed with three approaches to charm hadroproduction: recombination quark-parton model, quark-gluon string model, and perturbative QCD based models. Calculations show that the larger are zenith angles and water thickness above the detector, the lower is the energy at which the prompt muon flux becomes equal to conventional one (``crossing energy'') . For instance, for the depth of the Baikal …
We investigate the potential of a future kilometer-scale neutrino telescope such as the proposed IceCube detector in the South Pole, to measure and disentangle the yet unknown components of the cosmic neutrino flux, the prompt atmospheric neutrinos coming from the decay of charmed particles and the extra-galactic neutrinos, in the 10 TeV to 1 EeV energy range. Assuming a power law type spectra, $dϕ_ν/dE_ν\sim αE_ν^β$, we quantify the discriminating power of the IceCube detector and discuss how well we can determine magnitude ($α$) as well as slope ($β$) of these two components of the high ener…
The prompt muon contribution to the deep-sea atmospheric muon flux can serve as a tool for probing into the small-x feature of the gluon density inside of a nucleon, if the muon energy threshold could be lifted to 100 TeV. The prompt muon flux underwater is calculated taking into consideration predictions of recent charm production models in which the small-x behaviour of the gluon distribution is probed. We discuss the possibility of distinguishing the PQCD models of the charm production differing in the small-x exponent of the gluon distribution, in measurements of the muon flux at energies …
We discuss the possible existence of an observational window, in the TeV-PeV energy range, for the detection of prompt neutrinos from the decay of charmed particles produced in cosmic ray interactions with the atmosphere. We calculate the event rates for muon and tau neutrinos of heavy quark, mostly charm, origin. We argue that their prompt fluxes are observable in a kilometer-scale neutrino telescope, even though the calculations are subjected to large uncertainties, which we quantify. We raise the possibility that a small component of prompt neutrinos may already be present in the observed s…
In this work, the lepton-number-violating processes in $|ΔL|=2$ decays of $Λ_b^0$ baryon, $Λ_b^0 \to p π^+μ^- μ^-$ and $Λ_b^0 \to Λ_c^+ π^+μ^- μ^-$, are investigated for the first time, via an intermediate on-shell Majorana neutrino $N$ with a mass in the GeV scale. We explore the experimental sensitivity of these dimuon channels at the LHCb and CMS experiments, in which heavy neutrino lifetimes in the accessible ranges of $τ_N = [1, 100, 1000]$ ps are considered. For a integrated luminosity collected of 10 and 50 fb${}^{-1}$ at the LHCb and 30, 300 and 3000 fb${}^{-1}$ at the CMS, we found si…
The nu_mu -> nu_tau oscillation hypothesis will be tested through nu_tau production of tau in underground neutrino telescopes as well as long-baseline experiments. We provide the full QCD framework for the evaluation of tau neutrino deep inelastic charged current (CC) cross sections, including next-leading-order (NLO) corrections, charm production, tau threshold, and target mass effects in the collinear approximation. We investigate the violation of the Albright-Jarlskog relations for the structure functions F_4,5 which occur only in heavy lepton (tau) scattering. Integrated CC cross sections …
