High-Energy Atmospheric Neutrinos from Charm Decays (with L. Pascalli and M. H. Reno), selected publication related to this topic: L. Pascalli, M. H. Reno and I. Sarcevic, Astropart. Phys. 9 , 193 (1998) and Physical Review D59 , 034020 (1999).

FREJUS Collaboration has recently reported enhanced muon flux in TeV energy range, indicating that perhaps prompt muon flux from charm decay is larger than expected in the ``standard'' atmospheric neutrino and muon calculation. We have started looking into prompt muons and neutrinos production in cosmic ray interactions with nuclei in the atmosphere which arise through semi-leptonic decays of hadrons containing heavy quarks, mostly charm and bottom, including next-to-leading order radiative corrections and improved small-x parton distributions. As a starting point, we have done full next-to-leading order calculation of the dimuon spectrum at high energies. The importance of charm and bottom contribution was found to be significant in the low dimuon mass region. We expect that results for cosmic ray energies will be significantly different than what is currently part of the ``standard'' atmospheric neutrino flux.