Heavy Sterile Neutrinos in Tau Decays and the MiniBooNE Anomaly

Abstract

Current results of the MiniBooNE experiment show excess events that indicate neutrino oscillations, but only if one goes beyond the standard 3 family scenario. Recently a different explanation of the events has been given, not in terms of oscillations but by the production and decay of a massive sterile neutrino with large transition magnetic moment. We study the effect of such a sterile neutrino in the rare decays ${\tau }^{-}\to {\mu }^{-}{\mu }^{+}{\pi }^{-}\nu$ and ${\tau }^{-}\to {\mu }^{-}{\mu }^{+}{e}^{-}\nu \nu$. We find that searches for these decays featuring displaced vertices between the ${\mu }^{-}$ and the other charged particles, constitute good tests for the existence of the sterile neutrino proposed to explain the MiniBooNE anomaly. These searches could be done with already existing experimental data.

4 pages, 1 figure

References in corpus (6)

• Resolution of puzzles from the LSND, KARMEN, and MiniBooNE experiments
• Status of 3+1 Neutrino Mixing
• Muon Capture Constraints on Sterile Neutrino Properties
• Heavy-neutrino decays at neutrino telescopes
• The LSND/MiniBooNe excess events and heavy neutrino from muon and kaon decays
• Recent Progress on Tau Lepton Physics

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• Production of heavy sterile neutrinos from vector boson decay at electroweak temperatures
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• Exploring GeV-scale Majorana neutrinos in lepton-number-violating ${\Lambda }_b^0$ baryon decays
• Discovering intermediate mass sterile neutrinos through ${\tau }^{-}\to {\pi }^{-}{\mu }^{-}{e}^{+}\nu$ (or $\bar{\nu }$) decay
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• Addressing spectroscopic quality of covariant density functional theory
• Four-body decays of $B$ meson with lepton number violation
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• The case for mixed dark matter from sterile neutrinos
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