arXiv subjects
Publications and source records attributed to M. H. Reno.
Next-to-leading order QCD corrections, order 1 GeV mass corrections and the role of a strangeness asymmetry and isospin violation in the x dependence of the parton distribution functions are evaluated in the context of the neutrino-nucleon cross section. Their contributions to evaluations of the weak mixing angle using the Paschos-Wolfenstein relation are discussed.
The ultrahigh energy neutrino cross section is reviewed. Experimental results from HERA electron-proton and positron-proton scattering have yielded new information about the small x behavior of the parton distribution functions. We compare pre-HERA era neutrino-nucleon cross sections with more recent evaluations.
The deep-inelastic neutrino-nucleon cross section is one of the components of few GeV neutrino interactions. We present here our results for neutrino-isoscalar nucleon charged current scattering including perturbative next-to-leading order QCD corrections, target mass corrections, charm mass and lepton mass corrections.
The theoretical status of the neutrino-nucleon cross section is reviewed for incident neutrino energies up to E_nu=10^12 GeV, including different approaches to high energy extrapolations. Nonstandard model physics may play a role at ultrahigh energies. The cases of mini-black hole production and electroweak instanton contributions are discussed as examples in the context of ultrahigh energy neutrino scattering.
Astrophysical sources of ultrahigh energy neutrinos yield tau neutrino fluxes due to neutrino oscillations. We study in detail the contribution of tau neutrinos with energies above $10^6$ GeV relative to the contribution of the other flavors. We consider several different initial neutrino fluxes and include tau neutrino regeneration in transit through the Earth and energy loss of charged leptons. We discuss signals of tau neutrinos in detectors such as IceCube, RICE and ANITA.
A recently completed next-to-leading-order program to calculate neutrino cross sections, including power-suppressed mass correction terms, has been applied to evaluate the Paschos-Wolfenstein relation, in order to quantitatively assess the validity and significance of the NuTeV anomaly. In particular, we study the shift of $\sin^2 θ_{\mathrm{W}}$ obtained in calculations with a new generation of PDF sets that allow $s(x)\neq \bar{s}(x)$, enabled by recent neutrino dimuon data from CCFR and NuTeV, as compared to the previous $s = \bar{s}$ parton distribution functions like CTEQ6M. The extracted value of $\sin^2 θ_{\mathrm{W}}$ is closely correlated with the strangeness asymmetry momentum integral $\int_{0}^{1}x[s(x)-\bar{s}(x)] dx$. We also consider isospin violating effects that have recently been explored by the MRST group. The results of our study suggest that the new dimuon data, the Weinberg angle measurement, and other data sets used in global QCD parton structure analysis can all be consistent within the Standard Model.
We provide a complete and consistent framework to include subasymptotic perturbative as well as mass corrections to the leading twist (tau=2) evaluation of charged and neutral current weak structure functions and the perturbative neutrino cross sections. We revisit previous calculations in a modern language and fill in the gaps that we find missing for a complete and ready-to-use "NLO xi-scaling" formulary. In particular, as a new result we formulate the mixing of the partonic and hadronic structure function tensor basis in the operator approach to deep inelastic scattering. As an underlying framework we follow the operator product expansion a la Georgi & Politzer that allows the inclusion of target mass corrections at arbitrary order in QCD and we provide explicit analytical and numerical results at NLO. We compare this approach with a simpler collinear parton model approach to xi-scaling. Along with target mass corrections we include heavy quark mass effects as a calculable leading twist power suppressed correction. The complete corrections have been implemented into a Monte Carlo integration program to evaluate structure functions and/or integrated cross sections. As applications, we compare the operator approach with the collinear approximation numerically and we investigate the NLO and mass corrections to observables that are related to the extraction of the weak mixing angle from a Paschos-Wolfenstein-like relation in neutrino-iron scattering. We expect that the interpretation of neutrino scattering events in terms of oscillation physics and electroweak precision physics will benefit from our results.
Astrophysical sources of ultrahigh energy neutrinos yield tau neutrino fluxes due to neutrino oscillations. We study in detail the contribution of tau neutrinos with energies above PeV relative to the contribution of the other flavors. We consider several different initial neutrino fluxes and include tau neutrino regeneration in transit through the Earth and energy loss of charged leptons. We discuss signals of tau neutrinos in detectors such as IceCube, RICE and ANITA.
Astrophysical sources of ultrahigh energy neutrinos yield tau neutrino fluxes due to neutrino oscillations. At neutrino energies in the EeV range, radio Cherenkov detection methods show promise for detecting these fluxes. We quantify the tau neutrino contributions to the signal in, for example, a detector like the Radio Ice Cherenkov Experiment (RICE) for a Z-burst flux prediction. Tau neutrino regeneration in transit through the Earth, including energy loss, is evaluated.
Understanding neutrino interactions is an important task in searches for neutrino oscillations; e.g. the nu_{mu} -> nu_{tau} oscillation hypothesis will be tested through nu_{tau} production of tau in long-baseline experiments as well as underground neutrino telescopes. An anomaly in the deep inelastic interaction of neutrinos has recently been observed by the NuTeV collaboration -- resulting in a measured weak mixing angle sin^2 Theta_{W} that differs by ~ 3 sigma from the standard model expectation. In this contribution to the proceedings of NUINT02, we summarize results on the NLO neutrino structure functions and cross sections in which charm quark mass and target mass effects in the collinear approximation are included.
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 are evaluated naively over the full phase space and with the inclusion of DIS kinematic cuts. Uncertainties in our evaluation based on scale dependence, PDF errors and the interplay between kinematic and dynamical power corrections are discussed and/or quantified.
The energy dependence of "secondary" neutrinos from the process nutau->tau->numubar->mubar for two input tau neutrino fluxes (F^0_nu ~ 1/E_nu and 1/E_nu^2), assumed to have been produced via neutrino oscillations from extragalactic sources, is evaluated to assess the impact of secondary neutrinos on the upward muon rates in a km^3 detector. We show that the secondard fluxes are considerably suppressed for the steeper flux, and even for fluxes ~ 1/E_nu, the secondary flux will be difficult to observe experimentally.
The ultrahigh energy cross section for neutrino interactions with nucleons is reviewed, and unitarity constraints are discussed. We argue that existing QCD extrapolations are self-consistent, and do not imply a breakdown of the perturbative expansion in the weak coupling.
The photonuclear contribution to charged lepton energy loss has been re-evaluated taking into account HERA results on real and virtual photon interactions with nucleons. With large $Q^2$ processes incorporated, the average muon range in rock for muon energies of $10^9$ GeV is reduced by only 5% as compared with the standard treatment. We have calculated the tau energy loss for energies up to $10^9$ GeV taking into consideration the decay of the tau. A Monte Carlo evaluation of tau survival probability and range show that at energies below $10^7-10^8$ GeV, depending on the material, only tau decays are important. At higher energies the tau energy losses are significant, reducing the survival probability of the tau. We show that the average range for tau is shorter than its decay length and reduce to 17 km in water for an incident tau energy of $10^9$ GeV, as compared with its decay length of 49 km at that energy. In iron, the average tau range is 4.7 km for the same incident energy.
We evaluate the fluxes of neutrinos and muons from charmed particles produced by cosmic ray interactions with air nuclei. Using next-to-leading order perturbative QCD, we compare our results with calculations based on a PYTHIA Monte Carlo evaluation of charm production. We investigate the sensitivity of our results to the choice of parton distribution functions and the cosmic ray spectrum. Perturbative QCD yields larger lepton fluxes than the PYTHIA evaluation. The flux of muons from charm dominates the muon flux from pion and kaon decays for energies above $\sim 10^5$ GeV.
Using next-to-leading order perturbative QCD, we find that the charm contribution to the atmospheric lepton fluxes dominates over the conventional ones from pi and K decays for energies higher than 10^5 GeV. We also discuss theoretical uncertainties involved in the calculations and compare our results with previous evaluations.
We evaluate the sensitivity of the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) to charged heavy vector boson production followed by their decays to $W^\pm Z^0$. We include the correlated decays of the gauge bosons to leptonic final states. With an integrated luminosity of $10^5$ pb$^{-1}$, charged technirhos in the minimal SU(N)$_{TC}$ model for $N\geq 7$ yield signals with a significance larger than 5. In more general models, we explore the range of parameter space to which LHC experiments will be sensitive. Rapidity correlations exhibiting enhanced longitudinal gauge boson pair production are also shown.
We present an evaluation of the atmospheric tau neutrino flux in the energy range between $10^2$ and $10^6$ GeV. The main source of tau neutrinos is from charmed particle production and decay. The $ν_τN\to τX$ event rate for a detector with a water equivalent volume of 1 km$^3$ is on the order of 60-100 events per year for $E_τ>100$ GeV, reducing to 18 events above 1 TeV. Event rates for atmospheric muon neutrino oscillations to tau neutrinos are also evaluated.