Impact of high-energy hadron interactions on the atmospheric neutrino flux predictions

Abstract

We study the influence of hadron interaction features on the high-energy atmospheric neutrino spectrum. The 1D calculation is performed with use of the known high-energy hadronic models, SIBYLL 2.1, QGSJET-II, Kimel and Mokhov, for the parameterizations of primary cosmic ray spectra issued from the measurement data. The results are compared with the Frejus data and AMANDA-II measurements as well as with other calculations. Sizable difference of the neutrino fluxes (up to the factor of 1.8 at 1 TeV) that are obtained with the SIBYLL and QGSJET-II appears to be rather unexpected keeping in mind the hadron and muon flux calculations in the same energy region.