Influence of the photonuclear effect on electron-neutrino-induced electromagnetic cascades under the Landau-Pomeranchuk-Migdal regime in standard rock

TL;DR

This paper investigates how photonuclear interactions, alongside LPM suppression, affect the development and detectability of ultra-high energy electron neutrino-induced electromagnetic showers in standard rock, impacting neutrino flux limits.

Contribution

It provides the first comprehensive Monte Carlo analysis of UHE electron-induced showers considering both LPM and photonuclear effects, revealing their combined influence on shower length and detection.

Findings

Photonuclear processes become dominant in the LPM regime.

Shower lengths are significantly reduced when photonuclear interactions are included.

Previous neutrino flux limits are overly optimistic due to neglecting photonuclear effects.

Abstract

The observation of earth skimming neutrinos has been proposed as a rather sensitive method to detect ultra-high energy (UHE) cosmic neutrinos. Energetic cosmic neutrinos can interact inside the rock and produce leptons via a charged current interaction. In the case of an incoming electron neutrino undergoing a charged current interaction, the produced UHE electron will induce an underground electromagnetic shower. At high energy (above 7.7 TeV in standard rock), such showers are subject to LPM (Landau, Pomeranchuk and Migdal) suppression of the radiative processes cross sections (bremsstrahlung and pair production). The consequence of this suppression is that showers are elongated. This effect will increase the detection probability of such events allowing deeper showers to emerge with detectable energies. On the other hand, the photonuclear processes which are usually neglected in electromagnetic showers with respect to radiative processes, turn out to become dominant in the LPM regime and will reduce the shower length. In this work, we have performed a complete Monte Carlo study of an underground shower induced by UHE electrons by taking into account both the LPM suppression and the photonuclear interaction. We will discuss the effects of both of these processes on the shower length and on the detectability of such events by ground arrays or fluorescence telescopes. We show that limits on neutrino fluxes that were obtained using simulations that were obviously neglecting photonuclear processes are overoptimistic and should be corrected.