Heavy-lepton interpretation of multimuon events produced in neutrino and antineutrino beams

Abstract

We calculate neutrino production of a charged heavy lepton $M^{-}$ from an isoscalar target assuming both light-to-light and light-to-heavy quark transitions. Then we examine the cascade decay of the $M^{-}$ into another heavy lepton $L^0$ via $M^{-}\to L^0+X$ and $M^{-}\to L^0+{\mu }^{-}+{\overline{\nu }}_{\mu }$, followed by the decay of the $L^0$ into both ${\mu }^{-}+X$ and ${\mu }^{-}+{\mu }^{+}+{\nu }_{\mu }$. These decays yield ${\mu }^{-}{\mu }^{-}$, ${\mu }^{-}{\mu }^{+}$, and ${\mu }^{-}{\mu }^{-}{\mu }^{+}$ multimuon events. We compute event rates and distributions for these types of lepton cascade chains. Also, we discuss results for the antineutrino production of the $M^{+}$ followed by analogous decay chains resulting in ${\mu }^{+}{\mu }^{+}$, ${\mu }^{+}{\mu }^{-}$, and ${\mu }^{+}{\mu }^{+}{\mu }^{-}$ events.