We reevaluate e + e − pair production from electromagnetic interactions of muons in transit through materials. Our approach, through the use of structure functions for inelastic and elastic scattering and including hadronic recoil, make the formalism useful for tau pair production at high energies.Our results for e + e − pairs agree well with prior evaluations. Tau pair production, however, has significant contributions from inelastic scattering in addition to the usual coherent scattering with the nucleus and scattering with atomic electrons.
We evaluate the flux of tau neutrinos produced from the decay of pair
produced taus from incident muons using a cascade equation analysis. To solve
the cascade equations, our numerical result for the tau production $Z$ moment
is given. Our results for the flux of tau neutrinos produced from incident
muons are compared to the flux of tau neutrinos produced via oscillations and
the direct prompt atmospheric tau neutrino flux. Results are given for both
downward and upward going neutrinos fluxes and higher zenith angles are
discussed. We conclude that the direct prompt atmospheric tau neutrino flux
dominates these other atmospheric sources of tau neutrinos for neutrino
energies larger than a few TeV for upward fluxes, and over a wider range of
energy for downward fluxes.Comment: 4 pages, 2 figure
The differential energy distribution for electrons and taus produced from
lepton pair production from muons in transit through materials is numerically
evaluated. We use the differential cross section to calculate underground
lepton fluxes from an incident atmospheric muon flux, considering contributions
from both conventional and prompt fluxes. An approximate form for the charged
current differential neutrino cross section is provided and used to calculate
single lepton production from atmospheric neutrinos. We compare the fluxes of
underground leptons produced from incident muons with those produced from
incident neutrinos and photons from muon bremsstrahlung. We discuss their
relevance for underground detectors.Comment: 11 pages, 9 figures v2: Revised to include the calculation of muon
bremsstrahlung events in comparison to pair production events. 1 new figur
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