Resonant Scattering of Antineutrinos

Abstract

The hypothesis of an unstable charged boson to mediate muon decay radically affects the cross section for the process $\overline{\nu }+e\to \overline{\nu }+{\mu }^{-}$ near the energy at which the intermediary may be produced. If the boson is assumed to have $K$-meson mass, the resonance occurs at an incident antineutrino energy of ∼2×${10}^{12}$ ev. The flux of energetic antineutrinos produced in association with cosmic-ray muons will then produce two muon counts per day per square meter of detector, independently of the depth and the orientation at which the experiment is performed.