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arXiv · 1705.00353

Radiative decay of heavy neutrinos at MiniBooNE and MicroBooNE

Luis Alvarez-Ruso·Eduardo Saul-Sala
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Abstract

The MiniBooNE experiment reported results from the analysis of $ν_e$ and $\overlineν_e$ appearance searches, which showed an excess of signal-like events at low reconstructed neutrino energies with respect to the expected background. A proposed explanation for this anomaly is based on the existence of a heavy ($\sim 50$~MeV) sterile neutrino. These $ν_h$ would be produced by $ν_μ$ electromagnetic and neutral current interactions. A fraction of them decays radiatively inside the detector. The emitted photon is misidentified as an electron or positron in MiniBooNE. We have investigated the $ν_h$ production by coherent and incoherent electroweak interactions at the MiniBooNE and MicroBooNE targets, CH$_2$ and Ar, respectively. Studying the $ν_h$ propagation inside the detector, we obtain the energy and angular distributions of emitted photons for a choice of model parameters. The distinctive shape and total number of photon events from this mechanism at MicroBooNE makes its experimental investigation possible.

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Luis Alvarez-Ruso, Eduardo Saul-Sala. 2017-04-30. Radiative decay of heavy neutrinos at MiniBooNE and MicroBooNE. https://arxiv.org/abs/1705.00353

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