Eur. Phys. J. A (2005) 24: 459-474
https://doi.org/10.1140/epja/i2004-10234-2

Original Article

Charged lepton production from iron induced by atmospheric neutrinos

Department of Physics, Aligarh Muslim University, 202 002, Aligarh, India

Received: 30 September 2004
Accepted: 12 April 2005
Published online: 8 June 2005

Abstract

The charged current lepton production induced by neutrinos in ⁵⁶Fe nuclei has been studied. The calculations have been done for the quasielastic as well as the inelastic reactions assuming Δ-dominance and take into account the effect of Pauli blocking, Fermi motion and the renormalization of weak transition strengths in the nuclear medium. The quasielastic production cross-sections for lepton production are found to be strongly reduced due to nuclear effects, while there is about 10% reduction in the inelastic cross-sections in the absence of the final-state interactions of the pions. The numerical results for the momentum and angular distributions of the leptons averaged over the various atmospheric-neutrino spectra at the Soudan and Gran Sasso sites have been presented. The effect of nuclear-model dependence and the atmospheric-flux dependence on the relative yield of μ to e has been studied and discussed.