Lepton Fluxes from Atmospheric Charm

Abstract

We reexamine the charm contribution to atmospheric lepton fluxes in the context of perturbative QCD. We include next-to-leading order corrections and discuss theoretical uncertainties due to the extrapolations of the gluon distributions at small-x. We show that the charm contribution to the atmospheric muon flux becomes dominant over the conventional contribution from pion and kaon decays at energies of about 10^5 GeV. We compare our fluxes with previous calculations.

Comments: 19 pages, latex, revtex, psfig