A new contribution to the conventional atmospheric neutrino flux

Abstract

Atmospheric neutrinos are an important background to astrophysical neutrino searches, and are also of considerable interest in their own right. This paper points out that the contribution to conventional atmospheric $\nu_e$ of the rare semileptonic decay of $K_S$ becomes significant at high energy. Although the $K_S\rightarrow \pi e\nu$ branching ratio is very small, the short $K_S$ lifetime leads to a high critical energy, so that, for vertical showers, the inclusion of $K_S$ semileptonic decay increases the conventional $\nu_e$ flux by $\approx 30%$ at energies above 100 TeV. In this paper, we present calculations of the flux of $\nu_e$ from $K_S$. At energies above their critical energies, the $\nu_e$ fluxes from kaon decay may be simply related to the kaon semileptonic widths; this leads to a near-equality between the flux of $\nu_e$ from $K^+$, $K_L$ and $K_S$.