Nuclear effects in high-energy neutrino interactions

Understand

Neutrino telescopes like IceCube, KM3NeT and Baikal-GVD offer physicists the opportunity to study neutrinos with energies far beyond the reach of terrestrial accelerators.

• These neutrinos are used to study high-energy neutrino interactions and to probe the Earth through absorption tomography.
• Current studies of TeV neutrinos use cross sections which are calculated for free nucleons with targets which are assumed to contain equal numbers of protons and neutrons.
• Here we consider modifications of high-energy neutrino interactions due to two nuclear effects: modifications of the parton densities in the nucleus, referred to here as shadowing, and the effect of non-isoscalar targets, with unequal numbers of neutrons and protons.