New muon decay experiment to search for heavy sterile neutrino

It has been recently shown that puzzling excess events observed by the LSND and MiniBooNE neutrino experiments could be interpreted as a signal from the radiative decay of a heavy sterile neutrino (nu_h) of the mass from 40 to 80 MeV with a muonic mixing strength ~ 10^{-3} - 10^{-2}. If such nu_h exists its admixture in the ordinary muon decay would result in the decay chain mu -> e nu_e nu_h -> e nu_e gamma nu. We proposed a new experiment for a sensitive search for this process in muon decay at rest allowing to definitively confirm or exclude the existence of the nu_h. To our knowledge, no experiment has specifically searched for the signature of radiative decay of massive neutrinos from muon decays as proposed in this work. The search is complementary to the current experimental efforts to clarify the origin of the LSND and MiniBooNE anomalies. Bounds on the muonic mixing strength from precision measurements with muons are discussed.