Discovering neutrino tridents at the Large Hadron Collider
Wolfgang Altmannshofer, Toni Mäkelä, S. Sarkar, Sebastian Trojanowski, Keping Xie, B. Zhou
Abstract
Neutrino trident production of dilepton pairs is well recognized as a sensitive probe of both electroweak physics and physics beyond the Standard Model. Although a rare process, it could be significantly boosted by such new physics, and it also allows the electroweak theory to be tested in a new regime. We demonstrate that the forward neutrino physics program at the Large Hadron Collider offers a promising opportunity to measure for the first time, dimuon neutrino tridents with a statistical significance exceeding <a:math xmlns:a="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" display="inline"> <a:mn>5</a:mn> <a:mi>σ</a:mi> </a:math> , improving on the previous claims at the <c:math xmlns:c="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" display="inline"> <c:mo>∼</c:mo> <c:mn>3</c:mn> <c:mi>σ</c:mi> </c:math> level by the CHARM-II and CCFR collaborations while accounting for additional backgrounds later identified by the NuTeV collaboration. We present predictions for various proposed experiments and outline a specific experimental strategy to identify the signal and mitigate backgrounds, based on “reverse tracking” dimuon pairs in the <e:math xmlns:e="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" display="inline"> <e:mrow> <e:mi>FASER</e:mi> <e:mi>ν</e:mi> <e:mn>2</e:mn> </e:mrow> </e:math> detector. We also discuss prospects for constraining beyond Standard Model contributions to neutrino trident rates at high energies. Published by the American Physical Society 2024