Soto A Garcia, Zhelnin P, Safa I, Argüelles C A
Department of Physics and Laboratory for Particle Physics and Cosmology, Harvard University, Cambridge, Massachusetts 02138, USA.
Instituto de Física Corpuscular (IFIC), Universitat de València (UV), 46980 Paterna, València, Spain.
Phys Rev Lett. 2022 Apr 29;128(17):171101. doi: 10.1103/PhysRevLett.128.171101.
High-energy muon and electron neutrinos yield a non-negligible flux of tau neutrinos as they propagate through Earth. In this Letter, we address the impact of this additional component in the PeV and EeV energy regimes for the first time. Above 300 TeV, this contribution is predicted to be significantly larger than the atmospheric background, and it alters current and future neutrino telescopes' capabilities to discover a cosmic tau-neutrino flux. Further, we demonstrate that Earth-skimming neutrino experiments, designed to observe tau neutrinos, will be sensitive to cosmogenic neutrinos even in extreme scenarios without a primary tau-neutrino component.
高能μ子和电子中微子在穿过地球时会产生不可忽略的τ中微子通量。在本信函中，我们首次探讨了这一额外成分在PeV和EeV能量区间的影响。在300 TeV以上，预计这一贡献将显著大于大气背景，并且它会改变当前和未来中微子望远镜发现宇宙τ中微子通量的能力。此外，我们证明，旨在观测τ中微子的掠地中微子实验，即使在没有主要τ中微子成分的极端情况下，也将对宇宙成因中微子敏感。
