Rikard Enberg
Uppsala / LBNL
Abstract:
High energy cosmic rays that hit Earth, and astrophysical sources where
protons are shock-accelerated to high energies are both examples of
cosmic beam dump experiments. In the atmosphere the cosmic rays collide
with the nuclei of the atmosphere and in astrophysical sources the
protons collide with material present in the jet and the source. These
high-energy collisions produce neutrinos through decays of the produced
mesons and baryons. I will give a brief introduction, and then discuss
our recent results for neutrino fluxes arising from charm quark
production both in the atmosphere and in astrophysical sources. Because
of their larger masses and shorter lifetimes, charmed mesons are subject
to much less hadronic and radiative cooling than pions and kaons, and
even though the production cross section is smaller, neutrinos from
charm dominate at higher energies.