Atmospheric trident production for probing new physics

Abstract

We propose to use atmospheric neutrinos as a powerful probe of new physics beyond the Standard Model via neutrino trident production. The final state with double muon tracks simultaneously produced from the same vertex is a distinctive signal at large Cherenkov detectors. We calculate the expected event numbers of trident production in the Standard Model. To illustrate the potential of this process to probe new physics we obtain the sensitivity on new vector/scalar bosons with coupling to muon and tau neutrinos. (C) 2017 The Authors. Published by Elsevier B.V