Suitability studies of exotic muon decay at the High Intensity heavy-ion Accelerator Facility
Abstract
We present a detailed feasibility study of exotic muon decay searches using the muon beam at the High Intensity heavy-ion Accelerator Facility (HIAF). For the decay channel mu to eX0, where X0 denotes a new boson featuring LFV couplings, the produced electron carries very low energy when the mass of X0 approaches the muon mass, making detection challenging. Nevertheless, the high-energy beam at HIAF can boost these electrons up to a measurable energy range. The detector system proposed here comprises front-end scintillators for particle identification (PID) and a main detector consisting of an RPC stack to track decay products and a scintillator for energy measurement. Leveraging the kinematic properties of low momenta and small emission angles of signal electrons, we employ optimized momentum and angular acceptance cuts on the RPC detector to efficiently suppress background events. With this strategy, we obtain an upper limit of 1e-5 on the branching ratio of the exotic muon decay at 95% confidence level, achieving state-of-the-art sensitivity.
Related
- Integration of Retrieval-Augmented Generation for Knowledge Access in the ELBE Accelerator Control System
- A pathway to improve Nb3Sn for SRF accelerator cavities via Zr inclusion
- Electron Dynamics in a Wakefield Accelerator Driven by Laser Pulses Carrying Orbital Angular Momentum
- Report of the National Lab Accelerator Study Group for a Muon Collider
- Brilliance: toward autonomous computational research in particle accelerator physics
BibTeX
@misc{dong2026suitability,
title = {{Suitability studies of exotic muon decay at the High Intensity heavy-ion Accelerator Facility}},
author = {Lingzhi Dong and Jinning Li and Leyun Gao and Cheng-en Liu and Yu Xu and Xuecheng Zhang and Liangwen Chen and Qite Li and Chen Zhou and Qiang Li and Zhiyu Sun},
howpublished = {arXiv},
year = {2026},
month = sep,
doi = {10.48550/arxiv.2609.31321},
eprint = {2609.31321},
archivePrefix = {arXiv},
url = {https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.31321},
}
RIS
TY - UNPB
TI - Suitability studies of exotic muon decay at the High Intensity heavy-ion Accelerator Facility
AU - Lingzhi Dong
AU - Jinning Li
AU - Leyun Gao
AU - Cheng-en Liu
AU - Yu Xu
AU - Xuecheng Zhang
AU - Liangwen Chen
AU - Qite Li
AU - Chen Zhou
AU - Qiang Li
AU - Zhiyu Sun
PY - 2026
DA - 2026/09/25
PB - arXiv
DO - 10.48550/arxiv.2609.31321
UR - https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.31321
AB - We present a detailed feasibility study of exotic muon decay searches using the muon beam at the High Intensity heavy-ion Accelerator Facility (HIAF). For the decay channel mu to eX0, where X0 denotes a new boson featuring LFV couplings, the produced electron carries very low energy when the mass of X0 approaches the muon mass, making detection challenging. Nevertheless, the high-energy beam at HIAF can boost these electrons up to a measurable energy range. The detector system proposed here comprises front-end scintillators for particle identification (PID) and a main detector consisting of an RPC stack to track decay products and a scintillator for energy measurement. Leveraging the kinematic properties of low momenta and small emission angles of signal electrons, we employ optimized momentum and angular acceptance cuts on the RPC detector to efficiently suppress background events. With this strategy, we obtain an upper limit of 1e-5 on the branching ratio of the exotic muon decay at 95% confidence level, achieving state-of-the-art sensitivity.
ER -