English

The Forward Neutrino Flux and its Secondaries at a 10 TeV Muon Collider

High Energy Physics - Phenomenology 2026-08-03 v1 High Energy Physics - Experiment

Abstract

Muon decays in a muon collider ring would produce TeV neutrino and antineutrino beams of electron and muon flavor. We study this flux in the forward μ+\mu^+ and μ\mu^- beam directions at a 10 TeV muon collider, introducing MINT, a dedicated Monte Carlo simulation to model neutrino fluxes including the muon beam dynamics. We find that a benchmark detector at 5 km from the interaction point would see about O(109)\mathcal{O}(10^{9}) neutrino interactions per year in a 3\sim3 tonne fiducial volume with a beam spot size of O(1)\mathcal{O}(1) meter. We calculate the number of secondary muons and neutrinos generated by neutrino interactions in the rock upstream of the forward detectors and find that about two secondary high-energy and highly polarized muons from the rock would cross each detector per bunch crossing. Neutrino productions of charmed mesons and taus in the rock generate a small ντ+νˉτ\nu_\tau+\bar\nu_\tau secondary flux, with O(0.2)\mathcal{O}(0.2) events per year in the detectors, likely too small to be observed. Wrong-sign neutrinos from similar processes, such as νe+νˉμ\nu_e+\bar\nu_\mu in the μ\mu^- beam, are more numerous but still of O(109)\mathcal{O}(10^{-9}) of the number of TeV neutrino interactions. Finally, we outline how the large forward neutrino exposure can be used to search for beyond-the-Standard-Model particles produced in neutrino interactions, with examples of heavy neutral leptons coupled to electron and muon flavors through mixing or electromagnetic dipole operators.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2608.02718,
  title  = {The Forward Neutrino Flux and its Secondaries at a 10 TeV Muon Collider},
  author = {Ju-Yeol Choi and Matheus Hostert and Peiran Li and Zhen Liu},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2608.02718},
  year   = {2026}
}

Comments

27 pages, 22 figures