Testing the neutrino content of the muon at muon colliders

A bstract 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 $$ e{\overline{\nu}}_e $$ <mml:math xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML"> <mml:mi>e</mml:mi> <mml:msub> <mml:mover> <mml:mi>ν</mml:mi> <mml:mo>¯</mml:mo> </mml:mover> <mml:mi>e</mml:mi> </mml:msub> </mml:math> 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 $$ e{\overline{\nu}}_e $$ <mml:math xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML"> <mml:mi>e</mml:mi> <mml:msub> <mml:mover> <mml:mi>ν</mml:mi> <mml:mo>¯</mml:mo> </mml:mover> <mml:mi>e</mml:mi> </mml:msub> </mml:math> production and charged-current pair production of heavy states, we compare results obtained using PDFs with those of a fixed-order simulation.