NA62 sensitivity to heavy neutral leptons in the low scale seesaw model

Abstract The sensitivity of beam dump experiments to heavy neutral leptons depends on the relative strength of their couplings to individual lepton flavours in the Standard Model. We study the impact of present neutrino oscillation data on these couplings in the minimal type I seesaw model and find...

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Bibliographic Details
Main Authors: Marco Drewes, Jan Hajer, Juraj Klaric, Gaia Lanfranchi
Format: Article
Language:English
Published: SpringerOpen 2018-07-01
Series:Journal of High Energy Physics
Subjects:
Online Access:http://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/JHEP07(2018)105
Description
Summary:Abstract The sensitivity of beam dump experiments to heavy neutral leptons depends on the relative strength of their couplings to individual lepton flavours in the Standard Model. We study the impact of present neutrino oscillation data on these couplings in the minimal type I seesaw model and find that it significantly constrains the allowed heavy neutrino flavour mixing patterns. We estimate the effect that the DUNE experiment will have on these predictions. We then discuss implication that this has for the sensitivity of the NA62 experiment when operated in the beam dump mode and provide sensitivity estimates for different benchmark scenarios. We find that the sensitivity can vary by almost two orders of magnitude for general choices of the model parameters, but depends only weakly on the flavour mixing pattern within the parameter range that is preferred by neutrino oscillation data.
ISSN:1029-8479