English

Lepton-Number-Charged Scalars and Neutrino Beamstrahlung

High Energy Physics - Phenomenology 2018-05-02 v1 High Energy Physics - Experiment

Abstract

Experimentally, baryon number minus lepton number, BLB-L, appears to be a good global symmetry of nature. We explore the consequences of the existence of gauge-singlet scalar fields charged under BLB-L -- dubbed lepton-number-charged scalars, LeNCS -- and postulate that these couple to the standard model degrees of freedom in such a way that BLB-L is conserved even at the non-renormalizable level. In this framework, neutrinos are Dirac fermions. Including only the lowest mass-dimension effective operators, some of the LeNCS couple predominantly to neutrinos and may be produced in terrestrial neutrino experiments. We examine several existing constraints from particle physics, astrophysics, and cosmology to the existence of a LeNCS carrying BLB-L charge equal to two, and discuss the emission of LeNCS's via "neutrino beamstrahlung," which occurs every once in a while when neutrinos scatter off of ordinary matter. We identify regions of the parameter space where existing and future neutrino experiments, including the Deep Underground Neutrino Experiment, are at the frontier of searches for such new phenomena.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.1802.00009,
  title  = {Lepton-Number-Charged Scalars and Neutrino Beamstrahlung},
  author = {Jeffrey M. Berryman and André de Gouvêa and Kevin J. Kelly and Yue Zhang},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1802.00009},
  year   = {2018}
}

Comments

18 pages, 7 figures, 1 Appendix