New μ forces from νμ sources

Cari Cesarotti, Yonatan Kahn, Gordan Krnjaic, Duncan Rocha, Joshua Spitz

Research output: Contribution to journalArticlepeer-review

Abstract

Accelerator-based experiments reliant on charged pion and kaon decays to produce muon-neutrino beams also deliver an associated powerful flux of muons. Therefore, these experiments can additionally be sensitive to light new particles that preferentially couple to muons and decay to visible final states on macroscopic length scales. Such particles are produced through rare 3-body meson decays in the decay pipe or via muon scattering in the beam dump, and decay in a downstream detector. To demonstrate the potential of this search strategy, we recast existing MiniBooNE and MicroBooNE studies of neutral pion production in neutrino-induced neutral-current scattering (νμN→νμNπ0,π0→γγ) to place limits on light (<2mμ) muon-philic scalar particles that decay to diphotons through loops of virtual muons. While much of this parameter space has already been excluded by E137, we also project that SBND can be sensitive to unexplored parameter space for these models, and provide a road map for future neutrino experiments to perform dedicated searches for muon-philic forces.

Original languageEnglish (US)
Article number055032
JournalPhysical Review D
Volume110
Issue number5
DOIs
StatePublished - Sep 1 2024

ASJC Scopus subject areas

  • Nuclear and High Energy Physics

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