Production of muons and neutrinos in cosmic ray interactions with the atmosphere has been investigated with Monte Carlo models for hadronic interactions. The resulting conventional muon and neutrino fluxes (from $\pi$ and $K$ decays) agree well with earlier calculations, whereas our prompt fluxes from charm decays are significantly lower than earlier estimates. Charm production is mainly considered as a well defined perturbative QCD process, but we also investigate a hypothetical non-perturbative intrinsic charm component in the proton. The lower charm rate implies better prospects for detecting very high energy neutrinos from cosmic sources.
Categories: hep-ph