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Description
High energy neutrinos and muons produced in the atmospher are dominant backgrounds in astrophysical neutrino detection. Atmospheric neutrinos consist of a conventional component from long-lived meson decays and a prompt component from short-lived charmed hadron decays, where the latter dominates at high energies compared to the conventional component. This prompt flux, which has not yet been definitively measured, is a key uncertainty for both background modeling and the development of hadronic interaction models. This work presents the simulation of the prompt and conventional atmospheric components detectable in TRIDENT, a proposed multi-cubic-kilometer next-generation neutrino telescope in the South China Sea. The simulation provides a spectrum prediction using the CORSIKA 8 framework, with Pythia8 for hadronic interactions to include advanced interaction models and a better description of the production and decay dynamics for charmed and heavier hadrons. The spectrum demonstrates the prospect of directly measuring the prompt atmospheric neutrinos with TRIDENT.
