Neutrino Telescopes as QCD Microscopes

TL;DR

This paper provides advanced predictions for ultra-high energy neutrino-nucleus cross-sections using NNLO calculations with small-x resummation, incorporating experimental constraints and nuclear effects, aiding future neutrino telescope data interpretation.

Contribution

It introduces state-of-the-art NNLO predictions for UHE neutrino cross-sections with small-x resummation and improved nuclear and heavy-quark effects, enhancing theoretical accuracy.

Findings

Predictions incorporate small-x BFKL effects and NNLO accuracy.

Constraints from LHCb D-meson data improve free-nucleon PDFs.

Nuclear corrections and heavy-quark effects are quantitatively assessed.

Abstract

We present state-of-the-art predictions for the ultra-high energy (UHE) neutrino-nucleus cross-sections in charged- and neutral-current scattering. The calculation is performed in the framework of collinear factorisation at NNLO, extended to include the resummation of small-$x$ BFKL effects. Further improvements are made by accounting for the free-nucleon PDF constraints provided by $D$-meson data from LHCb and assessing the impact of nuclear corrections and heavy-quark mass effects. The calculations presented here should play an important role in the interpretation of future data from neutrino telescopes such as IceCube and KM3NET, and highlight the opportunities that astroparticle experiments offer to study the strong interactions.