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Far-forward neutrinos at the Large Hadron Collider
Journal article   Open access   Peer reviewed

Far-forward neutrinos at the Large Hadron Collider

Weidong Bai, Milind Diwan, Maria Vittoria Garzelli, Yu Seon Jeong and Mary Hall Reno
The journal of high energy physics, Vol.2020(6), pp.1-38
06/01/2020
DOI: 10.1007/JHEP06(2020)032
url
https://doi.org/10.1007/JHEP06(2020)032View
Published (Version of record) Open Access

Abstract

We present a new calculation of the energy distribution of high-energy neutrinos from the decay of charm and bottom hadrons produced at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC). In the kinematical region of very forward rapidities, heavy-flavor production and decay is a source of tau neutrinos that leads to thousands of charged-current tau neutrino events in a 1 m long, 1 m radius lead neutrino detector at a distance of 480 m from the interaction region. In our computation, next-to-leading order QCD radiative corrections are accounted for in the production cross-sections. Non-perturbative intrinsic-k(T) effects are approximated by a simple phenomenological model introducing a Gaussian k(T) -smearing of the parton distribution functions, which might also mimic perturbative effects due to multiple initial-state soft-gluon emissions. The transition from partonic to hadronic states is described by phenomenological fragmentation functions. To study the effect of various input parameters, theoretical predictions for Ds +/- production are compared with LHCb data on double-differential cross-sections in transverse momentum and rapidity. The uncertain- ties related to the choice of the input parameter values, ultimately affecting the predictions of the tau neutrino event distributions, are discussed. We consider a 3+1 neutrino mixing scenario to illustrate the potential for a neutrino experiment to constrain the 3+1 parameter space using tau neutrinos and antineutrinos. We find large theoretical uncertainties in the predictions of the neutrino fluxes in the far-forward region. Untangling the effects of tau neutrino oscillations into sterile neutrinos and distinguishing a 3+1 scenario from the standard scenario with three active neutrino flavours, will be challenging due to the large theoretical uncertainties from QCD.
 Physical Sciences Physics Physics, Particles & Fields Science & Technology

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