Abstract
The DUNE near detector will collect an unprecedented large number of neutrino interactions, allowing the precise measurement of rare processes such as neutrino trident production, i.e. the generation of a lepton-antilepton pair through the scattering of a neutrino off a heavy nucleus. The event rate of this process is a powerful probe to a well-motivated parameter space of new physics beyond the Standard Model. In this paper, we perform a detailed sensitivity study of the DUNE near detector to neutrino tridents. We provide state-of-the-art predictions for the Standard Model cross sections and corresponding event rates at the near detector for the nu_mu -> nu_mu mu^+ mu^-, nu_mu -> nu_mu e^+e^- and nu_mu -> nu_e e^+ mu^- trident interactions (and the corresponding anti-neutrino modes), discussing their uncertainties. We analyze all relevant backgrounds, utilize a Geant4-based simulation of the DUNE-near detector liquid argon TPC (the official DUNE simulation at the time of writing this paper), and identify a set of selection cuts that would allow the DUNE near detector to measure the nu_mu -> nu_mu mu^+ mu^- cross section with a ~25% accuracy after running in neutrino and anti-neutrino modes for ~3 years each. This would lead to the most precise measurement of the trident process, surpassing the previous measurement by the CCFR collaboration. We show that this measurement would be highly sensitive to new physics, and, in particular, we find that the parameter space of models with gauged L_mu - L_tau that can explain the (g-2)_mu anomaly could be covered almost entirely. As a byproduct, a new Monte Carlo tool to generate neutrino trident events is made publicly available.
Highlights
Neutrino trident production is a weak process by which a neutrino, scattering off the Coulomb field of a heavy nucleus, generates a pair of charged leptons [1,2,3,4,5,6,7]
If the new physics is heavy compared to the relevant momentum transfer in the trident process, its effect is model-independently described by a modification of the effective four fermion interactions introduced in Eq (2)
We present the region that could be probed by a 25% measurement of the neutrino trident cross section at Deep Underground Neutrino Experiment (DUNE), which would extend the coverage of new physics parameter space substantially
Summary
Neutrino trident production is a weak process by which a neutrino, scattering off the Coulomb field of a heavy nucleus, generates a pair of charged leptons [1,2,3,4,5,6,7]. We study in detail the prospects for measuring neutrino trident production at the near detector of DUNE. As will be discussed below, the trident cross section is to a good approximation proportional to the charge squared (Z2) of the target nuclei: Z 1⁄4 18 for argon (DUNE), Z 1⁄4 14 for silicon (CHARM II), and Z 1⁄4 26 for iron (CCFR and NuTeV). Despite the smaller Z2 compared to CCFR and NuTeV, the highintensity muon-neutrino beam at the DUNE near detector leads to a sizable production rate of neutrino tridents. We analyze the kinematic distributions of signal and backgrounds, and determine the accuracy with which the νμ → νμμþμ− cross section can be measured at the DUNE near detector. Our neutrino trident Monte Carlo generator tool can be found as an ancillary file on the arXiv entry for this paper
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