Speaker
Description
We evaluate the prompt atmospheric neutrino flux at high energies using
three different frameworks for calculating the heavy quark production cross
in QCD: NLO perturbative QCD, kT factorization including low-x resummation,
and the dipole model including parton saturation. We use QCD parameters, the
value for the charm quark mass and the range for the factorization
and renormalization scales that provide the best description of the total
charm cross section measured at fixed target experiments, at RHIC and at LHC.
Using these parameters we calculate differential cross sections for charm
and bottom production and compare with the latest data on forward charm
meson production from LHCb at 7 TeV and at 13 TeV, finding good agreement
with the data. In addition, we investigate the role of nuclear shadowing
by including nuclear parton distribution functions (PDF) for the target
air nucleus using two different nuclear PDF schemes. Depending on the
scheme used, we find the reduction of the flux due to nuclear effects
varies from 10% to 50% at the highest energies. Finally, we compare our
results with the IceCube limit on the prompt neutrino flux,
which is already providing valuable information about some of the QCD models.
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