Data-driven approach for hadronic interactions in the estimation of atmospheric lepton fluxes

Precise knowledge of atmospheric neutrino and muon fluxes is essential in the search for astrophysical neutrinos and the measurements of neutrino oscillations. Atmospheric leptons are created in extensive air shower cascades initialized by cosmic rays (CRs) entering the Earth's atmosphere. The evolution of an atmospheric particle shower can be described by cascade equations, which characterize the transport and conversion of various particle species through the atmosphere. The Matrix Cascade Equations (MCEq) software is using this approach in a semi-analytical way to estimate the flux of atmospheric particles at the surface of Earth. The precision of these leptonic fluxes is mainly limited by the uncertainties in the CR spectrum and the lack of knowledge from hadronic particle interactions within the cascade. For the latter input from Monte Carlo event generators (SIBYLL or EPOS) is integrated in the current version of MCEq. Over the last years, fixed target experiments at CERN operated high precision measurements to study the behavior of such hadronic particle interactions. In this talk a method to incorporate these experimental results to the MCEq framework and the potential of this approach to reduce the uncertainties of atmospheric lepton fluxes are presented.