- Physical Review Journals
All JournalsPhysics Magazine
Access Provided by Xinjiang University

Physical Review D

Reuse & Permissions

It is not necessary to obtain permission to reuse this article or its components as it is available under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International license. This license permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided attribution to the author(s) and the published article's title, journal citation, and DOI are maintained. Please note that some figures may have been included with permission from other third parties. It is your responsibility to obtain the proper permission from the rights holder directly for these figures.

Export citation

Export citation

Choose format for download:

Download Citation
  • Open Access
  • Access by Xinjiang University

Prospects of measuring the atmospheric muon neutrino and antineutrino flux ratio with the ATLAS detector

Deep Ghosh1,*, Satyanarayan Mukhopadhyay2,†, and Biswarup Mukhopadhyaya1,2,‡

  • *Contact author: matrideb1@gmail.com
  • †Contact author: tpsnm@iacs.res.in
  • ‡Contact author: biswarup@iiserkol.ac.in
PDF

Phys. Rev. D 113, 112009 – Published 18 June, 2026

DOI: https://doi.org/10.1103/pj4c-cn41

Abstract

There is a significant uncertainty in the prediction of atmospheric muon neutrino and antineutrino flux ratio using different flux models, especially at higher energies. We study the prospects of experimentally measuring this flux ratio as a function of energy with the ATLAS detector at the LHC. To this end, we compute the contained-vertex and external upward going charged current event rates induced by atmospheric muon (anti)neutrinos through deep inelastic scattering at the 4 kiloton hadron calorimeter (HCAL) component of ATLAS. We illustrate the event selection criteria necessary to eliminate the cosmic ray muon background for the above event classes. While the contained vertex events have a striking topology with a muon being created inside the HCAL and then traveling to the muon chamber possibly through the tracker, for muons with energy larger than 3 GeV, nearly 10 times more events are obtained for the external upward going muons created in the rock column below the detector. Our estimates show that the energy dependence of the ratio of negative and positively charged muons induced by atmospheric muon neutrino and antineutrino fluxes can be measured by ATLAS up to a muon energy of 100 GeV, with 1000-live days of neutrino physics exposure over a period of several years, considering only the period with the LHC beams not in circulation, but the detector and magnetic fields of ATLAS in operation. With this exposure, we expect to obtain 60μ− and 30μ+ contained vertex events, and 599μ− and 292μ+ external upward-going events, after imposing the necessary selection criteria. For the latter class of events, this corresponds to an expected ratio of negative to positive charged muon events averaged over all energies, Rμ−/μ+=2.05−0.14+0.15, at 68% CL. The CMS detector at the LHC can also be used with comparable reach for studying the external upward-going rock muon events.

View figure in article

Physics Subject Headings (PhySH)

Article Text

References (49)

  1. T. K. Gaisser, Cosmic Rays and Particle Physics (Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, England, 1990).
  2. L. V. Volkova, Energy spectra and angular distributions of atmospheric neutrinos, Sov. J. Nucl. Phys. 31, 784 (1980).
  3. M. Honda, M. Sajjad Athar, T. Kajita, K. Kasahara, and S. Midorikawa, Atmospheric neutrino flux calculation using the NRLMSISE-00 atmospheric model, Phys. Rev. D 92, 023004 (2015).
  4. M. Honda, T. Kajita, K. Kasahara, and S. Midorikawa, Improvement of low energy atmospheric neutrino flux calculation using the JAM nuclear interaction model, Phys. Rev. D 83, 123001 (2011).
  5. Y. Ashie et al. (Super-Kamiokande Collaboration), Measurement of atmospheric neutrino oscillation parameters by Super-Kamiokande I, Phys. Rev. D 71, 112005 (2005).
  6. G. Battistoni, A. Ferrari, T. Montaruli, and P. R. Sala, High-energy extension of the FLUKA atmospheric neutrino flux, arXiv:hep-ph/0305208.
  7. M. Honda, T. Kajita, K. Kasahara, and S. Midorikawa, A new calculation of the atmospheric neutrino flux in a 3-dimensional scheme, Phys. Rev. D 70, 043008 (2004).
  8. G. D. Barr, T. K. Gaisser, P. Lipari, S. Robbins, and T. Stanev, A three—dimensional calculation of atmospheric neutrinos, Phys. Rev. D 70, 023006 (2004).
  9. H. Kitagawa et al. (Super-Kamiokande Collaboration) Measurements of the charge ratio and polarization of cosmic-ray muons with the Super-Kamiokande detector, Phys. Rev. D 110, 082008 (2024).
  10. J. P. Yáñez, A. Fedynitch, and T. Montgomery, Calibration of atmospheric neutrino flux calculations using cosmic muon flux and charge ratio measurements, Proc. Sci., ICRC2019 (2020) 881 [arXiv:1909.08365].
  11. E. Richard et al. (Super-Kamiokande Collaboration), Measurements of the atmospheric neutrino flux by Super-Kamiokande: Energy spectra, geomagnetic effects, and solar modulation, Phys. Rev. D 94, 052001 (2016).
  12. R. Abbasi et al. (IceCube Collaboration), Measurement of atmospheric neutrino mixing with improved IceCube DeepCore calibration and data processing, Phys. Rev. D 108, 012014 (2023).
  13. J. F. Beacom and M. R. Vagins, GADZOOKS! Anti-neutrino spectroscopy with large water Cherenkov detectors, Phys. Rev. Lett. 93, 171101 (2004).
  14. K. Abe et al. (Super-Kamiokande Collaboration), Neutron tagging following atmospheric neutrino events in a water Cherenkov detector, J. Instrum. 17, P10029 (2022).
  15. T. Wester et al. (Super-Kamiokande Collaboration), Atmospheric neutrino oscillation analysis with neutron tagging and an expanded fiducial volume in Super-Kamiokande I–V, Phys. Rev. D 109, 072014 (2024).
  16. D. G. Michael et al. (MINOS Collaboration), The magnetized steel and scintillator calorimeters of the MINOS experiment, Nucl. Instrum. Methods Phys. Res., Sect. A 596, 190 (2008).
  17. T. K. Gaisser and T. Stanev, Charge ratio of muons from atmospheric neutrinos, Phys. Lett. B 561, 125 (2003).
  18. P. Adamson et al. (MINOS Collaboration), Measurements of atmospheric neutrinos and antineutrinos in the MINOS far detector, Phys. Rev. D 86, 052007 (2012).
  19. G. Aad et al. (ATLAS Collaboration), The ATLAS experiment at the CERN large hadron collider, J. Instrum. 3, S08003 (2008).
  20. Among many studies, see, for example, ATLAS Collaboration, Calibration of the ATLAS hadronic barrel calorimeter TileCal using 2008, 2009 and 2010 cosmic rays data, Report No. ATL-TILECAL-PUB-2011-001.
  21. J. Kopp and M. Lindner, Detecting atmospheric neutrino oscillations in the ATLAS detector at CERN, Phys. Rev. D 76, 093003 (2007).
  22. Sunanda Banerjee (CMS Collaboration) (private communication).
  23. Status of the LHC talk by R. Steerenberg in the 12th LHCP conference, June, 2024. Available online at https://indico.cern.ch/event/1253590/contributions/5814442/attachments/2869113/5022764/rs20240603-LHCP-LHC-Report.pdf.
  24. F. Vannucci (private communication), as cited in [20,25].
  25. S. T. Petcov and T. Schwetz, Determining the neutrino mass hierarchy with atmospheric neutrinos, Nucl. Phys. B740, 1 (2006).
  26. A. Y. Wen, C. A. Argüelles, A. Kheirandish, and K. Murase, Detecting high-energy neutrinos from galactic supernovae with ATLAS, Phys. Rev. Lett. 132, 061001 (2024).
  27. J. Ridky et al. (DELPHI Collaboration), Detection of muon bundles from cosmic ray showers by the DELPHI experiment, Nucl. Phys. B, Proc. Suppl. 138, 295 (2005).
  28. P. Achard et al. (L3 Collaboration), Measurement of the atmospheric muon spectrum from 20-GeV to 3000-GeV, Phys. Lett. B 598, 15 (2004).
  29. J. Adam et al. (ALICE Collaboration), Study of cosmic ray events with high muon multiplicity using the ALICE detector at the CERN large hadron collider, J. Cosmol. Astropart. Phys. 01 (2016) 032.
  30. V. Khachatryan et al. (CMS Collaboration), Measurement of the charge ratio of atmospheric muons with the CMS detector, Phys. Lett. B 692, 83 (2010).
  31. G. Aad et al. (ATLAS Collaboration), Studies of the performance of the ATLAS detector using cosmic-ray muons, Eur. Phys. J. C 71, 1593 (2011).
  32. ATLAS Collaboration, Identification of very-low transverse momentum muons in the ATLAS experiment, Report No. ATL-PHYS-PUB-2020-002.
  33. ATLAS Collaboration, ATLAS muon spectrometer: Technical design report, Report No. CERN-LHCC-97-22.
  34. G. Aad et al. (ATLAS Collaboration), The ATLAS experiment at the CERN large hadron collider: A description of the detector configuration for Run 3, J. Instrum. 19, P05063 (2024).
  35. J. A. Formaggio and G. P. Zeller, From eV to EeV: Neutrino cross sections across energy scales, Rev. Mod. Phys. 84, 1307 (2012).
  36. M. Thomson, Modern Particle Physics (Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, England, 2013).

  37. We thank Ranjan Laha for raising this point, and M. V. N. Murthy for clarifying it during the talk by one of the authors, S. Mukhopadhyay, at the TAPP 2024 conference at IMSc., Chennai.

  38. G. Aad et al. (ATLAS Collaboration), Muon reconstruction performance of the ATLAS detector in proton–proton collision data at s=13  TeV, Eur. Phys. J. C 76, 292 (2016).
  39. G. Aad et al. (ATLAS Collaboration), Muon reconstruction and identification efficiency in ATLAS using the full Run 2pp collision data set at s=13  TeV, Eur. Phys. J. C 81, 578 (2021).
  40. F. James and M. Roos, Errors on ratios of small numbers of events, Nucl. Phys. B172, 475 (1980).
  41. O. Helene, Errors in experiments with small number of events, Nucl. Instrum. Methods Phys. Res., Sect. A 228, 120 (1984).
  42. W. Lohmann, R. Kopp, and R. Voss, Energy Loss of Muons in the Energy Range 1-GeV to 10000-GeV, 10.5170/CERN-1985-003.
  43. D. E. Groom, N. V. Mokhov, and S. I. Striganov, Muon stopping power and range tables 10-MeV to 100-TeV, At. Data Nucl. Data Tables 78, 183 (2001); Tables for muon energy loss are also available at http://pdg.lbl.gov/2009/AtomicNuclearProperties/.
  44. A. E. Erkoca, M. H. Reno, and I. Sarcevic, Muon fluxes from dark matter annihilation, Phys. Rev. D 80, 043514 (2009).
  45. L. Covi, M. Grefe, A. Ibarra, and D. Tran, Neutrino signals from dark matter decay, J. Cosmol. Astropart. Phys. 04 (2010) 017.
  46. R. Gandhi, P. Ghoshal, S. Goswami, P. Mehta, and S. U. Sankar, Earth matter effects at very long baselines and the neutrino mass hierarchy, Phys. Rev. D 73, 053001 (2006).
  47. I. Esteban, M. C. Gonzalez-Garcia, M. Maltoni, I. Martinez-Soler, J. P. Pinheiro, and T. Schwetz, NuFit-6.0: Updated global analysis of three-flavor neutrino oscillations, J. High Energy Phys. 12 (2024) 216.
  48. B. Feldstein and A. L. Fitzpatrick, Discovering asymmetric dark matter with anti-neutrinos, J. Cosmol. Astropart. Phys. 09 (2010) 005.
  49. H. Fukuda, S. Matsumoto, and S. Mukhopadhyay, Asymmetric dark matter in early Universe chemical equilibrium always leads to an antineutrino signal, Phys. Rev. D 92, 013008 (2015).

Outline

Information

Phys. Rev. D 113, 112009– Published 18 June, 2026
  • Received 12 November 2024
  • Accepted 21 May 2026
Crossmark - Check for updates button
Creative Commons Logo

Published by the American Physical Society under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International license. Further distribution of this work must maintain attribution to the author(s) and the published article’s title, journal citation, and DOI. Funded by SCOAP3.

Published by the American Physical Society

Sign In to Your Journals Account

Filter

Filter

Article Lookup

Enter a citation