Atmospheric Neutrinos

Abstract

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.