A novel experiment searching for the lepton flavour violating decay mu -> eee

Abstract

Since the discovery of neutrino oscillations it is known that lepton flavour is not conserved. Lepton flavour violating processes in the charged lepton sector have so far however eluded detection; as they are heavily suppressed in the standard model of particle physics, an observation would be a clear signal for new physics and help to understand the source of neutrino masses and CP violation. We propose a novel experiment searching for the decay mu -> eee with the aim of ultimately reaching a sensitivity of 10^-16, an improvement by four orders of magnitude compared to previous experiments. The technologies enabling this step are thin high-voltage monolithic active pixel sensors for precise tracking at high rates with a minimum of material and scintillating fibres for high resolution time measurements.