Research Proposal for an Experiment to Search for the Decay μ -> eee

physics.ins-det

/ Authors

A. Blondel, A. Bravar, M. Pohl, S. Bachmann, N. Berger, M. Kiehn, A. Schöning, D. Wiedner, B. Windelband, P. Eckert

and 15 more authors

H. -C. Schultz-Coulon, W. Shen, P. Fischer, I. Perić, M. Hildebrandt, P. -R. Kettle, A. Papa, S. Ritt, A. Stoykov, G. Dissertori, C. Grab, R. Wallny, R. Gredig, P. Robmann, U. Straumann

/ Abstract

We propose an experiment (Mu3e) to search for the lepton flavour violating decay mu+ -> e+e-e+. We aim for an ultimate sensitivity of one in 10^16 mu-decays, four orders of magnitude better than previous searches. This sensitivity is made possible by exploiting modern silicon pixel detectors providing high spatial resolution and hodoscopes using scintillating fibres and tiles providing precise timing information at high particle rates.