Fluxes of Atmospheric Neutrinos and Related Cosmic Rays

Abstract

The atmospheric neutrino beam simultaneously spans a range of pathlengths from ten to ten thousand kilometers, which correspond respectively to downward- and upward-going neutrinos. As with any neutrino oscillation experiment, also in this case the interpretation of the data depends on a detailed knowledge of the neutrino beam. The ingredients are the primary spectrum of cosmic-ray nucleons, the geomagnetic fields in which the charged particles propagate and the properties of interactions of hadrons in the atmosphere. In this talk I review the status of calculations in light of the recent evidence for neutrino oscillations from Super-Kamiokande (Y. Fukuda et al., Phys. Rev. Letters 81 (1998) 1562).