Constraints on light meson production in air-showers with atmospheric neutrinos below 1~TeV interacting in IceCube's DeepCore

TL;DR

This paper uses atmospheric neutrino data from IceCube's DeepCore to constrain light meson production, providing the first neutrino-based measurement of the atmospheric K/Pi ratio in a specific energy range.

Contribution

It introduces a novel analysis method to study meson production in atmospheric cascades using neutrino spectrum shapes, offering new insights beyond accelerator experiments.

Findings

First neutrino-based measurement of atmospheric K/Pi ratio.

Constraints on light and strange meson production in atmospheric cascades.

Enhanced understanding of particle interactions at TeV energies.

Abstract

The IceCube Neutrino Detector observes tens of thousands of atmospheric neutrinos every year with its low energy extension DeepCore, covering the neutrino energy range from GeV to TeV. These neutrinos can be used to study particle interactions in conditions that are inaccessible to current accelerator-based experiments. Here, we present constraints concerning the production of light and strange mesons in atmospheric particle cascades using a dedicated analysis based on the shape of the neutrino spectrum in zenith and energy. We report the first measurement of the atmospheric K/Pi-ratio in a constrained energy range exclusively from neutrino observations.