Bounds on majoron emission from muon to electron conversion experiments

Abstract

In models where lepton number is considered to be a spontaneously-broken global symmetry a massless Goldstone boson, the majoron (J), appears. We describe a procedure to explore the muon-electron-majoron coupling using the results from mu-e conversion search experiments. To accomplish that, we determine how the energy spectrum of the muon decay into an electron and a majoron is modified by binding effects in a muonic atom. We find that the future mu-to-e conversion experiments may be able to produce bounds on the mu->eJ rate which are comparable with the present ones from direct searches.

Comments: 8 pages, 2 figures. v2:Minor changes (including a slight change in the title). Journal version