Computation of atmospheric neutrinos flux

Author(s)

Gabriela Vitti Stenico

• Document type: Master's Dissertation
• Press: Campinas, SP.
• Institution: Universidade Estadual de Campinas (UNICAMP). Instituto de Física Gleb Wataghin
• Defense date: 2015-11-13

Examining board members

Orlando Luis Goulart Peres; Diego Rossi Gratieri; Ernesto Kemp

• Advisor: Orlando Luis Goulart Peres

Abstract

Atmospheric neutrinos are produced by interactions of cosmic rays with the Earth¿s atmosphere that create unstable secondary particles which weakly decay into neutrinos. Because of its wide energy spectrum, that covers energies of few hundred of MeV until energies on the order of TeV, these neutrinos are good objects on the test of new theories as well as the study of neutrino oscillation phenomenon where there is a change in the state of neutrino flavour to another. In addition, atmospheric neutrinos constitute background and calibration beam for astrophysical neutrino telescopes and the search for rare processes, which motivates us to study how is its production and evolution in the atmosphere. In this way, we want to determine the flux of atmospheric neutrinos through the basic reactions of its creation by weak interactions and the processes of absorption and scattering of charged parent particles, as pions and muons, generated by the interaction of protons, main constituent of cosmic rays with the atmosphere. For this, we will solve cascade equations that relate source and sink terms of the particle flux to obtain its evolution until the earth surface, including the atmosphere characteristics and geometry of primary particle incidence beam, evaluating the consistency of the calculations and comparing them with the results found in the literature. Done that, we will extend the results including an exotic decay, which does not exist in the Standard Model, to see if we can test it on atmospheric neutrino experiments (AU)

• FAPESP's process: 14/00347-3 - Computation of the Atmospheric Neutrino fluxes
• Grantee: Gabriela Vitti Stenico
• Support Opportunities: Scholarships in Brazil - Master