Deep inelastic scattering of very-high-energy neutrinos can potentially be enhanced by the production of a single top quark or charm quark via the interaction of a virtual $W$-boson exchange with a $b$-quark or $s$-quark parton in the nucleon. The single top contribution shows a sharp rise at neutrino energies above 0.5 PeV and gives a cross section contribution of order 5% at 10 PeV, while single charm has a low-energy threshold and contributes about 25%. Semileptonic decays of top and charm give dimuon events of which the kinematic characteristics are shown. The angular separation of the dimuons from heavy-quark production in the IceCube detector can reach up to 1 deg. Top-quark production has a unique, but rare, three muon signal.

• Received 8 November 2016

DOI:https://doi.org/10.1103/PhysRevD.95.093002