Calculation of atmospheric high-energy neutrino spectra and the measurement data of IceCube and ANTARES experiments

Abstract

Presented are results of calculation of the atmospheric neutrino spectra in the energy range from 100 GeV to 10 PeV using the QGSJET-II and SIBYLL 2.1 models of hadron–nuclear interactions and two experimentally based Zatsepin–Sokol’skaya and Hillas–Gaisser models of the cosmic ray spectrum. It is shown that rare decays of short-lived neutral kaons produce about one third of the flux of electron neutrinos and up to 10% of muon neutrinos at energies above 100 TeV. The calculated spectra agree satisfactorily with the IceCube and ANTARES measurement data. The measurement errors leave open the possibility of a contribution from decays of charmed particles to fluxes of muon neutrinos with energies above 500 TeV and electron neutrinos with energies above 30 TeV.