High-energy neutrino attenuation in the Earth and its associated uncertainties

Abstract

We describe nuFATE Neutrino Fast Attenuation Through Earth, a very rapid method of accurately computing the attenuation of high-energy neutrinos during their passage through Earth to detectors such as IceCube, ANTARES or KM3Net, including production of secondary neutrinos from $τ^\pm$ lepton decay. We then use this method to quantify the error on attenuation due to uncertainties in the isotropic neutrino spectrum, the composition of the Earth, and the parton distribution functions. We show that these can be as large as 20%, which can significantly impact reconstructed astrophysical neutrino parameters, as well as searches for new physics. An implementation of this algorithm is provided as a public code.