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Irreducible Bhabha background in the detection of muonium-antimuonium conversion

Mitrajyoti Ghosh1,*, Kevin Liguori1,†, Takemichi Okui1,2,‡, and Kohsaku Tobioka1,2,§

  • *Contact author: mghosh2@fsu.edu
  • †Contact author: kliguori@fsu.edu
  • ‡Contact author: tokui@fsu.edu
  • §Contact author: ktobioka@fsu.edu
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Phys. Rev. D 113, 056014 – Published 12 March, 2026

DOI: https://doi.org/10.1103/5czk-189l

Abstract

Experiments such as MACS and the proposed MACE study muonium-antimuonium conversion by the energies of the final state e±. The e+ and e− from an antimuonium decay tend to be nonrelativistic and relativistic, respectively, and vice versa for muonium. However, these e± can exchange their energies by hard Bhabha scattering, causing muonium to fake an antimuonium decay signal. We compute the rate for this background and find that, while negligible for MACE, it will become larger than the signal for conversion probabilities less than 10−18.

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Phys. Rev. D 113, 056014– Published 12 March, 2026
  • Received 7 November 2025
  • Accepted 13 February 2026
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Published by the American Physical Society under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International license. Further distribution of this work must maintain attribution to the author(s) and the published article’s title, journal citation, and DOI. Funded by SCOAP3.

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