2011/03/03 by Brian Batell, David McKeen, Maxim Pospelov · 3 citations
Physics and Astronomy · #Atomic physics #Charge radius #Dark Matter and Cosmic Phenomena #Electric charge #Electron #Lepton #Muon #Neutrino #Neutrino Physics Research #Nuclear physics #Parity (physics) #Particle physics #Particle physics theoretical and experimental studies #Physics #Proton #Quantum mechanics #RADIUS #Scalar (mathematics) #Scattering #hep-ex #hep-ph #nucl-ex #nucl-th
paper · pdf · doi:10.1103/physrevlett.107.011803
published as Phys.Rev.Lett.107:011803,2011 · 4 pages, 1 figure
arxiv created 2011/03/03 · openalex publication_date 2011/06/30 · arxiv updated 2011/07/28 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/08/05
The recent discrepancy between proton charge radius measurements extracted from electron-proton versus muon-proton systems is suggestive of a new force that differentiates between lepton species. We identify a class of models with gauged right-handed muon number, which contains new vector and scalar force carriers at the ∼100 MeV scale or lighter, that is consistent with observations. Such forces would lead to an enhancement by several orders-of-magnitude of the parity-violating asymmetries in the scattering of low-energy muons on nuclei. The relatively large size of such asymmetries, O(10(-4)), opens up the possibility for new tests of parity violation in neutral currents with existing low-energy muon beams.