atmospheric neutrinos大气中微子.pdfVIP

Hindawi Publishing Corporation Advances in High Energy Physics Volume 2012, Article ID 504715, 24 pages doi:10.1155/2012/504715 Review Article Atmospheric Neutrinos Takaaki Kajita Institute for Cosmic Ray Research and Kavli-IPMU, The University of Tokyo, Kashiwa-no-ha 5-1-5, Kashiwa, Chiba 277-8582, Japan Correspondence should be addressed to Takaaki Kajita, kajita@icrr.u-tokyo.ac.jp Received 8 July 2012; Accepted 11 September 2012 Academic Editor: Koichiro Nishikawa Copyright q 2012 Takaaki Kajita. This is an open access article distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited. Atmospheric neutrinos are produced as decay products in hadronic showers resulting from collisions of cosmic rays with nuclei in the atmosphere. Electron-neutrinos and muon-neutrinos are produced mainly by the decay chain of charged pions to muons to electrons. Atmospheric neutrino experiments observed zenith angle and energy-dependent deficit of muon-neutrino events. It was found that neutrino oscillations between muon-neutrinos and tau-neutrinos explain these data well. This paper discusses atmospheric neutrino experiments and the neutrino oscillation studies with these neutrinos. 1. Introduction Neutrinos are produced in various places such as in the Sun, the Earth, the atmosphere, and during the core collapse of a massive star. In addition neutrinos are produced in nuclear power plants and with beams of high energy protons. These neutrinos have been studied by various neutrino experiments. One of these experiments is called atmospheric neutrino exper- iments. These experiments study neutrinos produced by cosmic ray interactions in the a