English

Can lepton flavor violating interactions explain the LSND results?

High Energy Physics - Phenomenology 2009-10-31 v2

Abstract

If the atmospheric and the solar neutrino problem are both explained by neutrino oscillations, and if there are only three light neutrinos, then all mass-squared differences between the neutrinos are known. In such a case, existing terrestrial neutrino oscillation experiments cannot be significantly affected by neutrino oscillations, but, in principle there could be an anomaly in the neutrino flux due to new neutrino interactions. We discuss how a non-standard muon decay μ+e+νˉeν\mu^+ \to e^+ \bar\nu_e \nu_\ell would modify the neutrino production processes of these experiments. Since SU(2)LSU(2)_L violation is small for New Physics above the weak scale one can use related flavor-violating charged lepton processes to constrain these decays in a model independent way. We show that the upper bounds on μ3e\mu \to 3e, muonium-antimuonium conversion and τμee\tau \to \mu e e rule out any observable effect for the present experiments due to μ+e+νˉeν\mu^+ \to e^+ \bar\nu_e \nu_\ell for =e,μ,τ\ell=e,\mu,\tau, respectively. Applying similar arguments to flavor-changing semi-leptonic reactions we exclude the possibility that the "oscillation signals" observed at LSND are due to flavor-changing interactions that conserve total lepton number.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.hep-ph/9809524,
  title  = {Can lepton flavor violating interactions explain the LSND results?},
  author = {Sven Bergmann and Yuval Grossman},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:hep-ph/9809524},
  year   = {2009}
}

Comments

21 pages, 6 figures, Latex; minor corrections

R2 v1 2026-07-22T14:46:28.630Z