Search for charm-quark production via dimuons in neutrino telescopes*

Abstract

Abstract Dimuon events induced by charm-quark productions from neutrino deep inelastic scattering (DIS) processes have been studied in traditional DIS experiments for decades. The recent progress in neutrino telescopes makes it possible to search for such dimuon events at energies far beyond the laboratory scale. In this study, we construct a simulation framework to calculate yields and distributions of dimuon signals in an IceCube-like km3 scale neutrino telescope. Owing to the experimental limitation in the resolution of double-track lateral distance, only dimuons produced outside the detector volume are considered. Detailed information about simulation results for a 10-year exposure is presented. As an earlier paper[Physical Review D 105, 093005 (2022)] and ours report on a similar situation, we use that paper as a baseline to conduct comparisons. We then estimate the impacts of different calculation methods of muon energy losses. Finally, we study the experimental potential of dimuon searches under the hypothesis of single-muon background only. Our results based on a simplified double-track reconstruction indicate a moderate sensitivity, especially with the ORCA configuration. Further developments on both the reconstruction algorithm and possible detector designs are thus required and are under investigation.