arXiv subjects
Publications and source records attributed to C. Salles.
We present an overview of the phenomenology of prompt neutrinos produced in the atmosphere by the decay of charmed particles. In face of the great activity involving operational and proposed large scale neutrino telescopes, we discuss the implications of different scenarios in calculating the prompt flux, upon the detectable signals in these experiments.
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 samples of current experiments. We also discuss the interplay of the predicted fluxes with those produced by the flavor oscillation of conventional atmospheric neutrinos, and by anticipated cosmic sources.
We show that the simplest assumptions for the dynamics of particle production allow us to understand the fluxes of hadrons and photons at mountain altitudes as well as the structure of individual events. The analysis requires a heavy nuclear component of primary cosmic rays above the ``knee" in the spectrum with average mass number $ = 7.3 \pm 0.9$.
We show that a simple scaling model of very forward particle production, consistent with accelerator and air shower data, can describe all features of the very high-energy interactions recorded with emulsion chambers. This is somewhat surprising after numerous claims that the same data implied large scaling violations or new dynamics. Interestingly, we cannot describe some of the Centauro events, suggesting that these events are anomalous independently of their well-advertised unusual features such as the absence of neutral secondaries.