Ponente
Descripción
Tau neutrinos, being most likely of astrophysical origin, plays a crucial role in solving cosmic‐ray–related puzzles. In IceCube, iterations of searches for tau neutrinos via their characteristic “double-cascade” / "double pulse” morphology have been conducted. However, this signature is not unique to tau neutrinos: the much less studied charmed production can lead to a similar signature due to the D meson’s similar decay lifetimes with tau leptons. Furthermore, D mesons constitute about 10 % of all deep inelastic scattering (DIS) events. Beyond serving as a background to tau searches, D mesons are interesting in their own right—studying them provides insights into D–nucleon scattering at very high energies and constrains the intrinsic strange content of the nucleon. In this talk, we present a preliminary study of an inclusive search for D mesons and tau neutrinos in IceCube, covering the charm production simulation, an inclusive event selection, and implications for astrophysical tau‐neutrino searches.
