Far-forward neutrinos at the Large Hadron Collider
We present a new calculation of the energy distribution of high-energy neutrinos from the decay of charm and bottom hadrons produced at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC). In the kinematical region of very forward rapidities, heavy-flavor production and decay is a source of tau neutrinos that leads to thousands of charged-current tau neutrino events in a 1 m long, 1 m radius lead neutrino detector at a distance of 480 m from the interaction region. In our computation, next-to-leading order QCD radiative corrections are accounted for in the production cross-sections. Non-perturbative intrinsic-kT effects are approximated by a simple phenomenological model introducing a Gaussian kT-smearing of the parton distribution functions, which might also mimic perturbative effects due to multiple initial-state soft-gluon emissions. The transition from partonic to hadronic states is described by phenomenological fragmentation functions. To study the effect of various input parameters, theoretical predictions for D± s production are compared with LHCb data on double-differential cross-sections in transverse momentum and rapidity. The uncertainties related to the choice of the input parameter values, ultimately affecting the predictions of the tau neutrino event distributions, are discussed. We consider a 3+1 neutrino mixing scenario to illustrate the potential for a neutrino experiment to constrain the 3+1 parameter space using tau neutrinos and antineutrinos. We find large theoretical uncertainties in the predictions of the neutrino fluxes in the far-forward region. Untangling the effects of tau neutrino oscillations into sterile neutrinos and distinguishing a 3+1 scenario from the standard scenario with three active neutrino flavours, will be challenging due to the large theoretical uncertainties from QCD.
- Research Organization:
- Univ. of Iowa, Iowa City, IA (United States); Brookhaven National Laboratory (BNL), Upton, NY (United States)
- Sponsoring Organization:
- USDOE Office of Science (SC), High Energy Physics (HEP)
- Grant/Contract Number:
- SC0010113; SC0012704
- OSTI ID:
- 1656864
- Alternate ID(s):
- OSTI ID: 1638788
- Report Number(s):
- BNL-216157-2020-JAAM; TRN: US2203199
- Journal Information:
- Journal of High Energy Physics (Online), Vol. 2020, Issue 6; ISSN 1029-8479
- Publisher:
- Springer BerlinCopyright Statement
- Country of Publication:
- United States
- Language:
- English
Web of Science
| Probing Light Gauge Bosons in Tau Neutrino Experiments | text | January 2020 |
| FORMOSA: Looking Forward to Millicharged Dark Sectors | text | January 2020 |
| Oscillations of sterile neutrinos from dark matter decay eliminates the IceCube-Fermi tension | text | January 2021 |
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