Observation of Anomalous Dimuon Events in the NuTeV Decay Detector
NuTeV Collaboration, T. Adams, A. Alton, S. Avvakumov, L. de Barbaro, P. de Barbaro, R. H. Bernstein, A. Bodek, T. Bolton, J. Brau, D. Buchholz, H. Budd, L. Bugel, J. Conrad, R. B. Drucker, B. T. Fleming, R. Frey, J. Formaggio, J. Goldman, M. Goncharov, D. A. Harris, R. A. Johnson, J. H. Kim, S. Koutsoliotas, M. J. Lamm, W. Marsh, D. Mason, J. McDonald, C. McNulty, K. S. McFarland, D. Naples, P. Nienaber, A. Romosan, W. K. Sakumoto, H. Schellman, M. H. Shaevitz, P. Spentzouris, E. G. Stern, N. Suwonjandee, M. Vakili, A. Vaitaitis, U. K. Yang, J. Yu, G. P. Zeller, E. D. Zimmerman
Abstract
A search for long-lived neutral particles (N0) which decay into at least one muon has been performed using an instrumented decay channel at the E815 (NuTeV) experiment at Fermilab. The decay channel was composed of helium bags interspersed with drift chambers, and was used in conjunction with the NuTeV neutrino detector to search for N0 decays. The data were examined for particles decaying into the muonic final states mu mu, mu e, and mu pi. Three mu mu events were observed over an expected background of 0.040 +/- 0.009 events; no events were observed in the other modes. Although the observed events share some characteristics with neutrino interactions, the observed rate is a factor of 75 greater than expected. No Standard Model process appears to be consistent with this observation.
Create a lesson
Related papers
Observation of double ss production in e+e- collision at s = 3.08~GeV
BESIII Collaboration, M. Ablikim, M. N. Achasov et al.
A heterogeneous and vectorized sequence for the HL-LHC full tracking reconstruction of the CMS experiment
Emmanouil Vourliotis
Coverage Is Not Ordering: Ancillary Leakage and Representation Dependence in Covariance-Based Inference
Tommaso Dorigo
IRIS-HEP 2026 Statistical Ecosystem Blueprint White Paper
Matthew Feickert, Massimiliano Galli
Constraints on the Higgs boson total width from on-shell signal-background interference in the Hγγ decay channel with pp collisions at s=13 TeV with the ATLAS detector
ATLAS Collaboration
Status and Prospects of the HEP Statistical Inference Ecosystem
Massimiliano Galli