SINGLE PHOTON DECAYS OF THE $Z^0$ AND SUSY WITH SPONTANEOUSLY BROKEN R-PARITY

Abstract

Spontaneous violation of R parity can induce rare single photon decays of the $Z^0$ involving the emission of (nearly) massless pseudoscalar Goldstone bosons, majorons, as well as massive CP even or CP odd spin zero bosons that arise in the electroweak breaking sector of these models. We show that the majoron emitting decays can have a sizeable branching ratio of $10^{-5}$ or so, without conflicting any experimental observation from neutrino physics or particle searches. These decays may lead to interesting structures for the single photon spectrum involving either mono chromatic photons as well as continuous spectra that grow with energy. They would easily account for an excess of single photon events at high energies recently hinted at by the OPAL collaboration.