Associated Charm Production in Neutrino-Nucleus Interactions

Abstract

In this paper a search for associated charm production both in neutral and charged current $\nu$-nucleus interactions is presented. The improvement of automatic scanning systems in the {CHORUS} experiment allows an efficient search to be performed in emulsion for short-lived particles. Hence a search for rare processes, like the associated charm production, becomes possible through the observation of the double charm-decay topology with a very low background. About 130,000 $\nu$ interactions located in the emulsion target have been analysed. Three events with two charm decays have been observed in the neutral-current sample with an estimated background of 0.18$\pm$0.05. The relative rate of the associated charm cross-section in deep inelastic $\nu$ interactions, $\sigma (c\bar{c}\nu )/{\sigma }_{\mathrm{NC}}^{\mathrm{DIS}}=(3.62_{-2.42}^{+2.95}(stat)\pm 0.54(syst))\times 10^{-3}$ has been measured. One event with two charm decays has been observed in charged-current ${\nu }_{\mu }$ interactions with an estimated background of 0.18$\pm$0.06 and the upper limit on associated charm production in charged-current interactions at 90% C.L. has been found to be $\sigma (c\bar{c}{\mu }^{-})/{\sigma }_{\mathrm{CC}}<9.69\times 10^{-4}$.

10 pages, 4 figures

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