Searching for Heavy Quarks at NMC: A Simple Estimate of Background Muons from $\pi$ and $K$ decays

Abstract

New physics can be searched for in deep inelastic scattering experiments. New phenomena, like additional production mechanisms for heavy quarks, manifest themselves through production and decays of short-lived hadrons, which give additional muons in their decays. Muons from decays of light mesons can then be a severe background, especially at fixed target experiments. In order to make a first estimate of such a background a simple analytic method is here developed and applied on the muon scattering experiment NMC.