Tau Tridents at Accelerator Neutrino Facilities

19 Jun 2025, 15:30
17m
Clifton Court Hall 1170 (UC)

Clifton Court Hall 1170

UC

Speaker

Diego Lopez Gutierrez (Washington University in St Louis)

Description

We present the first detailed study of Standard Model neutrino tridents involving tau leptons at the near detectors of accelerator neutrino facilities. The rates of these processes were previously thought to be negligible, even at future facilities. Our full $2\to 4$ calculation, including both coherent and incoherent scatterings, reveals that
the DUNE near detector could observe a considerable number of tau tridents, which is an important background to new physics searches. We identify promising kinematic features that may allow distinction of tau tridents from the usual neutrino charged-current background at DUNE, and thus establish the observation of tau tridents for the first time. We also comment on the detection prospects at other accelerator and collider neutrino experiments.

Author

Diego Lopez Gutierrez (Washington University in St Louis)

Co-authors

Bhupal Dev (Washington University in St. Louis) Dr Innes Bigaran (Fermilab and Northwestern University) Pedro Machado (Fermilab)

Presentation materials