Prompt neutrinos from atmospheric charm in the general-mass variable-flavor-number scheme

Understand

We present predictions for the prompt-neutrino flux arising from the decay of charmed mesons and baryons produced by the interactions of high-energy cosmic rays in the Earth's atmosphere, making use of a QCD approach on the basis of the general-mass variable-flavor-number scheme for the description of charm hadroproduction at NLO, complemented by a consistent set of fragmentation functions.

• We compare the theoretical results to those already obtained by our and other groups with different theoretical approaches.
• We provide comparisons with the experimental results obtained by the IceCube Collaboration in two different analyses and we discuss the implications for parton distribution functions.