Tau neutrino and antineutrino cross sections

TL;DR

This paper provides a theoretical update on tau neutrino and antineutrino charged current cross sections for energies from 10 GeV to 10 TeV, including advanced QCD corrections and discussing associated uncertainties.

Contribution

It offers a comprehensive calculation of tau neutrino cross sections incorporating NLO QCD, target mass, and heavy quark effects, with detailed uncertainty analysis.

Findings

Cross sections are calculated with high precision for energies 10 GeV to 10 TeV.

Uncertainty sources such as structure functions and parton distributions are analyzed.

The results are relevant for interpreting signals in underground and ice neutrino detectors.

Abstract

Tau neutrino and antineutrino interactions with nucleons in large underground or under ice detectors will be important signals of astrophysical and atmospheric sources of neutrinos. We present here a theoretical update of the deep inelastic scattering contribution to the tau neutrino and antineutrino charged current cross sections with isoscalar nucleon targets and proton targets for incident neutrinos and antineutrinos in the energy range from 10 GeV to 10 TeV. Next-to-leading order quantum chromodynamic corrections, target mass corrections and heavy quark effects are included. Uncertainties in the cross section associated with the structure functions a low momentum transfers, the input parton distribution functions, scale dependence and flavor number scheme are discussed.