Dr. Mary Hall Reno

University of Iowa

Monday, October 13, 2008

4:00 p.m.

Cardwell 102 

Cosmic Rays and Atmospheric Leptons: Probes of the Standard Model and Beyond

Cosmic ray interactions led to particle discoveries in the era before particle accelerators were built. More recently, neutrino fluxes from cosmic ray interactions in the atmosphere have led to our understanding that neutrinos have mass. I will review how the atmospheric flux of neutrinos and muons is evaluated theoretically. I will present our recent results on very high energy lepton fluxes from charmed particle production and decay in the atmosphere.

Finally, I will discuss some examples of the potential for the measurement of the atmospheric lepton fluxes to constrain non-standard particle physics models.