Abstract
Within the framework of physics beyond the standard model we study the possibility that mesons produced in the atmosphere by the cosmic ray flux, decay to heavy Majorana neutrino and these mostly to photons in the low mass region. We study the photon flux produced by sterile Majorana neutrinos ($N$) decaying after passing through a massive and opaque object such as a mountain. In order to model the production of $N$'s in the atmosphere and their decay to photons, we consider the interaction between the Majorana neutrinos and the standard matter as modeled by an effective theory. We then calculate the heavy neutrino flux originated by the decay of mesons in the atmosphere. The surviving photon flux, originated by $N$ decays, is calculated using transport equations that include the effects of Majorana neutrino production and decay.
Highlights
The neutrino sector has provided through the discovery of neutrino flavor oscillations the most compelling evidence for physics beyond the Standard Model (SM)
We leave to Appendix A the study of meson decay to N in the effective formalism, and in Appendix B, we present the calculation for the N → νγ decay in the laboratory frame
The one-loop generated operators are suppressed by the 1=ð16π2Þ factor, but as we show in Ref. [13], these play a major role in the N decay
Summary
The neutrino sector has provided through the discovery of neutrino flavor oscillations the most compelling evidence for physics beyond the Standard Model (SM). The effective operators presented here allow the N decay to one neutrino plus one photon This decay channel could account, in a particular parameter region, for some neutrino-related problems such as the MiniBOONE [10,11] and SHALON [12] anomalies. We study the possibility that mesons produced in the atmosphere by the cosmic-ray decay to heavy Majorana neutrinos and these, in turn, decay mostly to photons in the low-mass region.
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