Charm Production in DPMJET

TL;DR

This paper evaluates charm production in the DPMJET simulation against experimental data, emphasizing its importance for cosmic ray air shower modeling and neutrino background estimation at high energies.

Contribution

It introduces adjustments to DPMJET for better charm production simulation, enhancing its accuracy for cosmic ray and neutrino research.

Findings

Improved agreement between DPMJET simulations and experimental charm production data.

Highlighting the significance of charm decay as a background in high-energy neutrino detection.

Demonstrating the necessity of reliable charm modeling for cosmic ray and neutrino experiments.

Abstract

In this work, charm production in the {\sc dpmjet} hadronic jet simulation is compared to experimental data. Since the major application of {\sc dpmjet} is the simulation of cosmic ray-induced air showers, the version of the code integrated in the CORSIKA simulation package has been used for the comparison. Wherever necessary, adjustments have been made to improve agreement between simulation and data. With the availability of new muon/neutrino detectors that combine a large fiducial volume with large amounts of shielding, investigation of prompt muons and neutrinos from cosmic ray interactions will be feasible for the first time. Furthermore, above $\gtrsim 100$ TeV charmed particle decay becomes the dominant background for diffuse extraterrestrial neutrino flux searches. A reliable method to simulate charm production in high-energy proton-nucleon interactions is therefore required.