Neutrino-induced multilepton events arising from the associated production of charmed particles

The authors discuss the contribution of associated production of charmed pairs cc to multilepton events in nu reactions, with emphasis on like-sign dimuons and trimuons. Both absolute rates and constraints from distributions are considered. They give one treatment which is purely phenomenological, obtaining the maximum amount of cc production which can be consistent with existing data on distributions, and giving relative amounts for different multilepton states. They also attempt a theoretical analysis which gives an estimate for the magnitude of cc production in nu reactions starting from photoproduction of psi ; this leads to a rate significantly larger than that due to perturbative quantum-chromodynamics estimates made so far. The authors give results for both the 350-GeV wide-band neutrino beam at CERN and the 400-GeV quadrupole triplet neutrino beam at Fermilab, including experimental cuts. Their results for trimuons and dimuons arising from cc decays are that sigma ( mu /sup -/ mu /sup -/ mu /sup +/)/ sigma ( mu /sup -/)<or approximately=1*10/sup -5/ and sigma ( mu /sup -/ mu /sup -/)/ sigma ( mu /sup -/ mu /sup +/)<or approximately=2*10/sup -2/. They do not find any need to search for anomalous sources of multimuon events. (27 refs).