Double neutrino production and detection in neutrino detectors

作者：van der Drift Don; Klein Spencer R^*

来源：Physical Review D - Particles, Fields, Gravitation and Cosmology, 2013, 88(3): 033013.

DOI：10.1103/PhysRevD.88.033013

Large, high-energy (E > 100 GeV) cosmic neutrino telescopes are now quite mature. IceCube, for example, observes about 50 000 well-reconstructed single atmospheric neutrino events/year, with energies above 100 GeV. Although the neutrino detection probability is small, current detectors are large enough so that it is possible to detect two neutrinos from the same cosmic-ray interaction. In this paper, we calculate the expected rate of double-neutrino interactions from a single cosmic-ray air shower. The rate is small, about 0: 07 events/year for a 1 km(3) detector like IceCube, with only a small dependence on the assumed cosmic-ray composition and hadronic interaction model. For a larger detector, like the proposed KM3Net, the rate is about 0: 8 events/year, high enough to be easily observable. These double neutrino interactions are the major irreducible background to searches for pairs of supersymmetric particles produced in neutrino or cosmic-ray air-shower interactions. Other standard model backgrounds are considered, and found to be small.

• 出版日期2013-8-23