Intermediate Boson. III. Virtual-Boson Effects in Neutrino Trident Production

The production of lepton tridents by neutrinos in a Coulomb field is a sensitive test of the diagonal terms in weak-interaction theory. If a charged vector boson exists then it can participate in such reactions as a virtual particle or a real one if the incident beam energy is sufficiently high. A neutral vector boson with no magnetic moment cannot interact with the electromagnetic field; so it participates only as a virtual particle. We examine in this paper two different effects due to these bosons. First that they have different effective couplings which modify the $V-A$ interaction to a more general combination of vector and axial-vector currents. At this level changes in the over-all coupling strength are more important than retaining effects due to the virtual-boson propagators. The recent model of Weinberg belongs to this classification. Second, we investigate the propagator effect of a charged vector boson mediating the usual $V-A$ theory.