Current non-conservation effects in ultra-high energy neutrino interactions

TL;DR

This paper investigates how non-conservation of weak currents at ultra-high energies significantly alters neutrino-nucleon interaction dynamics, leading to large corrections in the total cross section, especially due to top-bottom quark contributions.

Contribution

It introduces a simple, accurate formula for the top-bottom contribution to the neutrino-nucleon cross section considering non-conservation effects, highlighting their numerical significance.

Findings

Non-conservation effects increase the interaction scale to the top quark mass squared.

Corrections to the cross section are large and comparable to massless quark approximations.

The Double Leading Log Approximation effectively captures these effects.

Abstract

The overall hardness scale of the ultra-high energy neutrino-nucleon interactions is usually estimated as $Q^2\sim m_W^2$. The effect of non-conservation of weak currents pushes this scale up to the top quark mass squared and changes dynamics of the scattering process. The Double Leading Log Approximation provides simple and numerically accurate formula for the top-bottom contribution to the total cross section $\sigma^{\nu N}$. Corresponding correction to $\sigma^{\nu N}$ appears to be numerically large. It is comparable with the leading contribution evaluated in the massless quark approximation.