Abstract
Scalars that carry lepton number can help mediate would-be lepton number-violating processes, such as neutrinoless double β decay or lepton scattering-mediated nucleon-antinucleon conversion. Here, we show that such new scalars can also solve the anomaly in precision determinations of the fine-structure constant α from atom interferometry and from the electron's anomalous magnetic moment, ae(g-2)e/2, by reducing |ae|. Study of the phenomenological constraints on these solutions favor a doubly charged scalar with mass below the GeV scale. Significant constraints arise from the measurement of the parity-violating asymmetry in Møller scattering, and we consider the implications of the next-generation MOLLER experiment at Jefferson Laboratory and of an improved ae measurement.
| Original language | English |
|---|---|
| Article number | 075016 |
| Journal | Physical Review D |
| Volume | 102 |
| Issue number | 7 |
| DOIs | |
| State | Published - Oct 2020 |
Bibliographical note
Funding Information:We acknowledge partial support from the Department of Energy Office of Nuclear Physics under Contract No. DE-FG02-96ER40989. We thank Mark Pitt for alerting us to the importance of parity-violating electron scattering in this context. We also thank Yu-Sheng Liu for his generous assistance with the exclusion plots and Heather Logan and Daniel Stolarski for prompting us to investigate the constraints from the running of carefully. We thank Brian Batell, Bhupal Dev, and Tao Han for key input regarding the constraints from LEP on our model, and we thank Jeffrey Berryman and Yue Zhang for helpful discussions as well.
Publisher Copyright:
© 2020 authors.
ASJC Scopus subject areas
- Physics and Astronomy (miscellaneous)