Probing lepton flavour violation in ${\nu }_{\mu }+N\to \tau +...$ scattering and $\mu \to tau$ conversion on nucleons

Abstract

We study lepton flavour-violating interactions which could result in the $\tau$-lepton production in the ${\nu }_{\mu }N$ scattering or in $\mu \to \tau$ conversion on nucleons at high energies. Phenomenological bounds on the strength of $\bar{\tau }{\nu }_{\mu }\bar{q}{q}^{{}^{\prime }}$ interactions are extracted from the combined result of the NOMAD and CHORUS experiments on searching for ${\nu }_{\mu }-{\nu }_{\tau }$ oscillations. Some of these bounds supersede limits from rare decays. We also propose a ``missing energy'' type experiment searching for $\mu -\tau$ conversion on nucleons. The experiment can be performed at a present accelerator or at a future neutrino factory.

Comments: 13 pages, 4 figures