Tau Tridents at Accelerator Neutrino Facilities

TL;DR

This paper demonstrates that tau neutrino trident production at accelerator facilities like DUNE is detectable and can serve as a background for new physics, with distinctive features enabling their identification.

Contribution

First detailed calculation of tau neutrino tridents at accelerator detectors, showing potential for observation and background discrimination at DUNE.

Findings

DUNE can observe a significant number of tau tridents.

Distinctive kinematic features can distinguish tau tridents from backgrounds.

Tau trident observation is feasible at other neutrino experiments.

Abstract

We present the first detailed study of Standard Model neutrino tridents involving tau leptons at the near detectors of accelerator neutrino facilities. The rates of these processes were previously thought to be negligible, even at future facilities. Our full $2\to 4$ calculation, including both coherent and incoherent scatterings, reveals that the DUNE near detector could observe a considerable number of tau tridents, which is an important background to new physics searches. We identify promising kinematic features that may allow distinction of tau tridents from the usual neutrino charged-current background at DUNE, and thus establish the observation of tau tridents for the first time. We also comment on the detection prospects at other accelerator and collider neutrino experiments.