Constraining secret gauge interactions of neutrinos by meson decays

Abstract

Secret coupling of neutrinos to a new light vector boson, $Z^{\prime }$, with a mass smaller than 100 MeV is motivated within a myriad of scenarios which are designed to explain various anomalies in particle physics and cosmology. Due to the longitudinal component of the massive vector boson, the rates of three-body decay of charged mesons ($M$) such as the pion and the kaon to the light lepton plus neutrino and $Z^{\prime }$ ($M\to l\nu Z^{\prime }$) are enhanced by a factor of $(m_M/m_{Z^{\prime }}{)}^2$. On the other hand, the standard two body decay $M\to l\nu$ is suppressed by a factor of $(m_l/m_M{)}^2$ due to chirality. We show that in the case of ($M\to e\nu Z^{\prime }$), the enhancement of $m_M^4/m_e^2{m}_{Z^{\prime }}^2\sim 10^8-10^{10}$ relative to two-body decay ($M\to e\nu$) enables us to probe very small values of gauge coupling for ${\nu }_e$. The strongest bound comes from the $R_K\equiv Br(K\to e+\nu )/Br(K\to \mu +\nu )$ measurement in the NA62 experiment. The bound can be significantly improved by customized searches for signals of three-body charged meson decay into the positron plus missing energy in the NA62 and/or PIENU data.

7 pages, 3 figures

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