Testing the neutrino content of the muon at muon colliders

Abstract

Collinear emission of W bosons off a high-energy muon induces a large muon-neutrino component among the Parton Distribution Functions (PDFs) of a muon. In this paper we study the phenomenology related to the ν_μ PDF at future high-energy muon colliders. We examine total rates and differential distributions of the \( e{\overline{\nu}}_e \) and Wγ production processes, which receive a large, and often dominant, contribution from this PDF, allowing for a detailed experimental study. As a demonstration of the impact the ν_μ PDF could have for searches of new physics, we study the charged-current pair production of a couple of heavy states, components of a SU(2)_L doublet. In both \( e{\overline{\nu}}_e \) production and charged-current pair production of heavy states, we compare results obtained using PDFs with those of a fixed-order simulation.