Speaker
Dr
Gary Binder
(LBNL)
Description
In addition to its role in high-energy astrophysics, the IceCube Neutrino Observatory is a laboratory to study neutrino-nucleon deep inelastic scattering at multi-TeV energies far beyond the reach of accelerators. A recent analysis of contained neutrino interactions in IceCube will be presented where the inelasticity of charged-current $\nu_{\mu}$ interactions (the fraction of neutrino energy transferred to hadrons) is reconstructed as a new observable. The inelasticity distribution is found to be consistent with next-to-leading order pQCD calculations based on HERA PDFs in a neutrino energy range from 1 TeV to 100 TeV. The inelasticity distribution is also sensitive to neutrino charm production in an energy range up to 340 TeV—high enough that interactions of charm hadrons with nuclei in ice occur with high probability. Although the small event sample size limits the precision of results compared to theoretical uncertainties, a next-generation detector should improve these results and enable other studies of bottom and top physics as well as searches for physics beyond the Standard Model.
Primary author
Dr
Gary Binder
(LBNL)
