Probing new charged scalars with neutrino trident production
Gabriel Magill (Department of Physics and Astronomy, McMaster University, Hamilton, Ontario, Canada and Perimeter Institute for Theoretical Physics, Waterloo, Ontario, Canada); Ryan Plestid (Department of Physics and Astronomy, McMaster University, Hamilton, Ontario, Canada and Perimeter Institute for Theoretical Physics, Waterloo, Ontario, Canada)
We investigate the possibility of using neutrino trident production to probe leptophilic charged scalars at future high intensity neutrino experiments. We show that under specific assumptions, this production process can provide competitive sensitivity for generic charged scalars as compared to common existing bounds. We also investigate how the recently proposed mixed-flavor production—where the two oppositely charged leptons in the final state need not be muon flavored—can give a 20%–50% increase in sensitivity for certain configurations of new physics couplings as compared to traditional trident modes. We then categorize all renormalizable leptophilic scalar extensions based on their representation under , and discuss the Higgs triplet and Zee-Babu models as explicit UV realizations. We find that the inclusion of additional doubly charged scalars and the need to reproduce neutrino masses make trident production uncompetitive with current bounds for these specific UV completions. Our work represents the first application of neutrino trident production to study charged scalars. Additionally, it is the first application of mixed-flavor trident production to study physics beyond the standard model more generally.