On the search for muonic photons in neutrino experiments

Abstract

Conserved muonic number may turn out to be a conserved muonic charge, coupled to muonic photons, gamma_mu. Muons and muonic neutrinos would emit gamma_mu's, which might be discovered by analysing the data from the past and future high energy neutrino experiments (like CHARM II, CCFR, CHORUS, NOMAD, etc.). There are two sources of gamma_mu's in these experiments: 1) internal bremsstrahlung in pion and kaon decays into mu and nu_mu, which provide neutrino beams; 2) external bremsstrahlung of muons in the shielding of the neutrino beam. In both cases the gamma_mu's would pass freely through the shielding and produce narrow muonic pairs in the neutrino detectors. These pairs could be distinguished from the trident events nu_mu + Z -> nu_mu + mu^+ + mu^- + Z by their kinematical properties: small p_t of the muon pair, small invariant mass, etc. All the above processes are quantitatively analysed in this paper.