Unified atmospheric neutrino passing fractions for large-scale neutrino telescopes

TL;DR

This paper redefines and unifies the atmospheric neutrino passing fraction calculation, improving accuracy and enabling uncertainty analysis, with a software framework applicable to large-scale neutrino detectors.

Contribution

It introduces a unified approach to calculating passing fractions for all neutrino flavors, removing previous approximations and providing a comprehensive uncertainty estimation method.

Findings

Excellent agreement with Monte Carlo simulations

Uncertainty estimations from multiple inputs

Flexible software framework for neutrino observatories

Abstract

The atmospheric neutrino passing fraction, or self-veto, is defined as the probability for an atmospheric neutrino not to be accompanied by a detectable muon from the same cosmic-ray air shower. Building upon previous work, we propose a redefinition of the passing fractions by unifying the treatment for muon and electron neutrinos. Several approximations have also been removed. This enables performing detailed estimations of the uncertainties in the passing fractions from several inputs: muon losses, cosmic-ray spectrum, hadronic-interaction models and atmosphere-density profiles. We also study the passing fractions under variations of the detector configuration: depth, surrounding medium and muon veto trigger probability. The calculation exhibits excellent agreement with passing fractions obtained from Monte Carlo simulations. Finally, we provide a general software framework to implement this veto technique for all large-scale neutrino observatories.