Heavy neutrino search in accelerator-based experiments

Abstract

We explore the feasibility of detecting heavy neutrinos by the existing facilities of neutrino experiments. A heavy neutrino in the mass range 1 MeV < M < 500 MeV is produced by pion or kaon decay, and decays to charged particles which leave signals in neutrino detectors. Taking the T2K experiment as a typical example, we estimate the heavy neutrino flux produced in the neutrino beam line. Due to massive nature of the heavy neutrino, the spectrum of the heavy neutrino is significantly different from that of the ordinary neutrinos. While the ordinary neutrinos are emitted to various directions in the laboratory frame due to their tiny masses, the heavy neutrinos tend to be emitted to the forward directions and frequently hit the detector.The sensitivity for the mixing parameters is studied by evaluating the number of signal events in the near detector ND280. For the electron-type mixing, the sensitivity of T2K at 10^{21} POT is found to be better than that of the previous experiment PS191, which has placed the most stringent bounds on the mixing parameters of the heavy neutrinos for 140 MeV< M < 500 MeV.

26 pages, 17 figures

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Cited by in corpus (28)

• A facility to Search for Hidden Particles at the CERN SPS: the SHiP physics case
• Long-Lived Particles at the Energy Frontier: The MATHUSLA Physics Case
• The Phenomenology of Right Handed Neutrinos
• Phenomenology of GeV-scale Heavy Neutral Leptons
• Leptogenesis from a GeV Seesaw without Mass Degeneracy
• Combining Experimental and Cosmological Constraints on Heavy Neutrinos
• Search for heavy neutrinos with the T2K near detector ND280
• Testing the low scale seesaw and leptogenesis
• Heavy Neutral Leptons from low-scale seesaws at the DUNE Near Detector
• Probing Leptogenesis
• MeV-scale sterile neutrino decays at the Fermilab Short-Baseline Neutrino program
• Low-scale leptogenesis with three heavy neutrinos
• Probing leptogenesis with GeV-scale sterile neutrinos at LHCb and BELLE II
• Leptogenesis from Oscillations of Heavy Neutrinos with Large Mixing Angles
• Neutrinoless double $\beta$ decay and low scale leptogenesis
• Indirect Signals from Solar Dark Matter Annihilation to Long-lived Right-handed Neutrinos
• Nearly degenerate heavy sterile neutrinos in cascade decay: mixing and oscillations
• Effects of Long-lived 10 MeV Scale Sterile Neutrino on Primordial Elemental Abundances and Effective Neutrino Number
• Three-Body Decays of Heavy Dirac and Majorana Fermions
• Lepton Universality in the $\nu$MSM
• On the minimal active-sterile neutrino mixing in seesaw type I mechanism with sterile neutrinos at GeV scale
• Z-Boson Decays into Majorana or Dirac (Heavy) Neutrinos
• Space-time evolution of heavy sterile neutrinos in cascade decays
• Efficiently Exploring Multi-Dimensional Parameter Spaces Beyond the Standard Model
• Mass Reconstruction of Heavy Neutral Leptons from Stopped Mesons
• Constraints on Heavy Neutral Leptons interacting with a singlet scalar
• Probing heavy neutrinos in the COMET experiment
• Characterizing Heavy Neutral Fermions via their Decays