Charmed hadron production in the QGSJET-III model: Relevance to calculations of the prompt atmospheric neutrino background

The treatment of charmed hadron production in the framework of the QGSJET-III Monte Carlo generator is developed, including both perturbative and nonperturbative contributions. For the former, a leading order (LO) perturbative formalism is employed. The so-called <a:math xmlns:a="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" display="inline"><a:mi>K</a:mi></a:math> factor designed to take effectively into account higher-order corrections, which controls the magnitude of the LO perturbative contribution, is fixed based on a comparison with experimental data on <c:math xmlns:c="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" display="inline"><c:mi>D</c:mi></c:math> meson production at the Large Hadron Collider. For the nonperturbative intrinsic charm, a phenomenological Regge-based treatment is developed, with the corresponding normalization being chosen based on measurements of the spectra of <e:math xmlns:e="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" display="inline"><e:msub><e:mi mathvariant="normal">Λ</e:mi><e:mi>c</e:mi></e:msub></e:math> baryons at large values of Feynman <h:math xmlns:h="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" display="inline"><h:mi>x</h:mi></h:math>. The model is applied for a calculation of the prompt atmospheric muon neutrino flux in the 10–100 TeV and 1–10 PeV energy intervals.