Fernandez-Martinez, E., Gonzalez-Lopez, M., Hernandez-Garcia, J., Hostert, M., & Lopez-Pavon, J. (2023). Effective portals to heavy neutral leptons. J. High Energy Phys., 09(9), 001–45pp.
Abstract: The existence of right-handed neutrinos, or heavy neutral leptons (HNLs), is strongly motivated by the observation of neutrino masses and mixing. The mass of these new particles could lie below the electroweak scale, making them accessible to lowenergy laboratory experiments. Additional new physics at high energies can mediate new interactions between the Standard Model particles and HNLs, and is most conveniently parametrized by the neutrino Standard Model Effective Field Theory, or nu SMEFT for short. In this work, we consider the dimension six nu SMEFT operators involving one HNL field in the mass range of O(1) MeV < MN < O(100) GeV. By recasting existing experimental limits on the production and decay of new light particles, we constrain the Wilson coefficients and new physics scale of each operator as a function of the HNL mass.
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Beltran, R., Cepedello, R., & Hirsch, M. (2023). Tree-level UV completions for NRSMEFT d=6 and d=7 operators. J. High Energy Phys., 08(8), 31pp.
Abstract: We study ultra-violet completions for operators in standard model effective field theory extended with right-handed neutrinos (NRSMEFT). Using a diagrammatic method, we generate systematically lists of possible tree-level completions involving scalars, fermions or vectors for all operators at d = 6 and d = 7, which contain at least one right-handed neutrino. We compare our lists of possible UV models to the ones found for pure SMEFT. We also discuss how the observation of LNV processes via NRSMEFT operators at the LHC can be related to Majorana neutrino masses of the standard model neutrinos.
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Blennow, M., Fernandez-Martinez, E., Hernandez-Garcia, J., Lopez-Pavon, J., Marcano, X., & Naredo-Tuero, D. (2023). Bounds on lepton non-unitarity and heavy neutrino mixing. J. High Energy Phys., 08(8), 030–41pp.
Abstract: We present an updated and improved global fit analysis of current flavour and electroweak precision observables to derive bounds on unitarity deviations of the leptonic mixing matrix and on the mixing of heavy neutrinos with the active flavours. This new analysis is motivated by new and updated experimental results on key observables such as V-ud, the invisible decay width of the Z boson and the W boson mass. It also improves upon previous studies by considering the full correlations among the different observables and explicitly calibrating the test statistic, which may present significant deviations from a & chi;(2) distribution. The results are provided for three different Type-I seesaw scenarios: the minimal scenario with only two additional right-handed neutrinos, the next to minimal one with three extra neutrinos, and the most general one with an arbitrary number of heavy neutrinos that we parametrise via a generic deviation from a unitary leptonic mixing matrix. Additionally, we also analyze the case of generic deviations from unitarity of the leptonic mixing matrix, not necessarily induced by the presence of additional neutrinos. This last case relaxes some correlations among the parameters and is able to provide a better fit to the data. Nevertheless, inducing only leptonic unitarity deviations avoiding both the correlations implied by the right-handed neutrino extension as well as more strongly constrained operators is challenging and would imply significantly more complex UV completions.
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Batra, A., Bharadwaj, P., Mandal, S., Srivastava, R., & Valle, J. W. F. (2023). Phenomenology of the simplest linear seesaw mechanism. J. High Energy Phys., 07(7), 221–48pp.
Abstract: The linear seesaw mechanism provides a simple way to generate neutrino masses. In addition to Standard Model particles, it includes quasi-Dirac leptons as neutrino mass mediators, and a leptophilic scalar doublet seeding small neutrino masses. Here we review its associated physics, including restrictions from theory and phenomenology. The model yields potentially detectable μ-> e gamma rates as well as distinctive signatures in the production and decay of heavy neutrinos ( N-i) and the charged Higgs boson (H-+/-) arising from the second scalar doublet. We have found that production processes such as e(+) e(-) -> NN, e- gamma -> NH- and e(+) e(-) -> H (+) H- followed by the decay chain H-+/--> l(+/-) (i) N, N -> l`(+/-) (j) W (-/+) leads to striking lepton number violation signatures at high energies which may probe the Majorana nature of neutrinos.
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Fischer, O., Pattnaik, B., & Zurita, J. (2023). Testing Heavy Neutral Leptons in Cosmic Ray Beam Dump experiments. J. High Energy Phys., 07(7), 193–24pp.
Abstract: In this work, we discuss the possibility to test Heavy Neutral Leptons (HNLs) using “Cosmic Ray Beam Dump” experiments. In analogy with terrestrial beam dump experiments, where a beam first hits a target and is then absorbed by a shield, we consider high-energy incident cosmic rays impinging on the Earth's atmosphere and then the Earth's surface. We focus here on HNL production from atmospherically produced kaon, pion and D-meson decays, and discuss the possible explanation of the appearing Cherenkov showers observed by the SHALON Cherenkov telescope and the ultra-high energy events detected by the neutrino experiment ANITA. We show that these observations can not be explained with a long-lived HNL, as the relevant parameter space is excluded by existing constraints. Then we propose two new experimental setups that are inspired by these experiments, namely a Cherenkov telescope pointing at a sub-horizontal angle and shielded by the mountain cliff at Mount Thor, and a geostationary satellite that observes part of the Sahara desert. We show that the Cherenkov telescope at Mount Thor can probe currently untested HNL parameter space for masses below the kaon mass. We also show that the geostationary satellite experiment can significantly increase the HNL parameter space coverage in the whole mass range from 10 MeV up to 2 GeV and test neutrino mixing |U-& alpha;4|(2) down to 10(-11) for masses around 300 MeV.
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