Secondary lepton production, propagation, and interactions

Abstract

Charged current interactions of neutrinos inside the Earth can result in secondary muons and τ-leptons which are detectable by several existing and planned neutrino experiments through a wide variety of event topologies. Consideration of such events can improve detector performance and provide unique signatures which help with event reconstruction. In this work, we describe NuLeptonSim, a propagation tool for neutrinos and charged leptons that builds on the fast NuTauSim framework. NuLeptonSim considers energy losses of charged leptons, modeled both continuously for performance or stochastically for accuracy, as well as interaction models for all flavors of neutrinos, including the Glashow resonance. We demonstrate the results from including these effects on the Earth emergence probability of various charged leptons from different flavors of primary neutrino and their corresponding energy distributions. We find that the emergence probability of muons can be higher than that of taus for energies below 100 PeV, whether from a primary muon or τ neutrino, and that the Glashow resonance contributes to a surplus of emerging leptons near the resonant energy.