A More Complete Phenomenology of Tau Lepton Induced Air Showers

TL;DR

This study uses extensive CORSIKA simulations to analyze the detailed phenomenology of upward tau-induced air showers across a wide energy range, examining Cherenkov emission, particle distributions, and decay effects.

Contribution

It provides a comprehensive simulation-based analysis of tau-induced air showers, including decay modes and muon channels, challenging simplified assumptions used in prior estimations.

Findings

Tau decay length and modes significantly affect shower characteristics.

Muon decay channel plays an important role in shower phenomenology.

Simulation results highlight discrepancies with simplified models.

Abstract

Many proposed and upcoming experiments seek to observe signals from upward going air showers initiated by tau leptons resulting from neutrino interactions inside the Earth. To save calculation time, event estimations for these observation methods are usually performed while making several assumptions about the showers themselves, which simplifies their rich phenomenology and may or may not lead to inaccuracies in results. Here, we present results of extensive CORSIKA simulations of upward going tau initiated showers in the energy range 1 PeV to 10 EeV. Specifically, we monitor the Cherenkov emission, the charged particle distributions, and the timing of the showers for different geometric configurations. We analyze the impact of the decay length and different decay modes of the tau on particle distributions and compare to primaries usually utilized to simulate a tau shower, such as gammas, electrons, and protons. We also check the accuracy of many of the usual assumptions of these showers and analyze the often ignored muon channel of the tau decay.