Atmospheric neutrino flux supported by recent muon experiments

Abstract

We present a new one-dimensional calculation of low and intermediate energy atmospheric muon and neutrino fluxes, using up-to-date data on primary cosmic rays and hadronic interactions. We study several sources of uncertainties relevant to our calculations. A comparison with the muon fluxes and charge ratios measured in several modern balloon-borne experiments suggests that the atmospheric neutrino flux is essentially lower than one used for the standard analyses of the sub-GeV and multi-GeV neutrino induced events in underground detectors.

23 pages, 7 figures, 2 tables. Typos corrected, figure layout improved, references added. Final version accepted for publication in PLB