Nearly degenerate heavy sterile neutrinos in cascade decay: mixing and oscillations

Abstract

Some extensions beyond the Standard Model propose the existence of nearly degenerate heavy sterile neutrinos. If kinematically allowed these can be resonantly produced and decay in a cascade to common final states. The common decay channels lead to mixing of the heavy sterile neutrino states and interference effects. We implement non-perturbative methods to study the dynamics of the cascade decay to common final states, which features similarities but also noteworthy differences with the case of neutral meson mixing. We show that mixing and oscillations among the nearly degenerate sterile neutrinos can be detected as \emph{quantum beats} in the distribution of final states produced from their decay. These oscillations would be a telltale signal of mixing between heavy sterile neutrinos. We study in detail the case of two nearly degenerate sterile neutrinos produced in the decay of pseudoscalar mesons and decaying into a purely leptonic "visible" channel: ${\nu }_h\to e^{+}{e}^{-}{\nu }_a$. Possible cosmological implications for the effective number of neutrinos $N_{eff}$ are discussed.

updated references, more comments, same results, published version. arXiv admin note: text overlap with arXiv:1406.5739

References in corpus (13)

• Matter and Antimatter in the Universe
• How to find neutral leptons of the nuMSM?
• Sterile Neutrinos as the Origin of Dark and Baryonic Matter
• The nuMSM, leptonic asymmetries, and properties of singlet fermions
• Flavour Covariant Transport Equations: an Application to Resonant Leptogenesis
• Direct Bounds on Electroweak Scale Pseudo-Dirac Neutrinos from $\sqrt{s}=8$ TeV LHC Data
• Baryon Asymmetry of the Universe in the NuMSM
• Resonant CP Violation due to Heavy Neutrinos at the LHC
• On the Perturbative Stability of Quantum Field Theories in de Sitter Space
• Remarks on the lifetime of sterile neutrinos and the effect on detection of rare meson decays M+ -> M'- lepton+ lepton+
• Lepton number violating four-body tau lepton decays
• Heavy-neutrino decays at neutrino telescopes
• Space-time evolution of heavy sterile neutrinos in cascade decays

Cited by in corpus (17)

• Feebly-Interacting Particles:FIPs 2020 Workshop Report
• The Present and Future Status of Heavy Neutral Leptons
• Kadanoff-Baym Approach to Flavour Mixing and Oscillations in Resonant Leptogenesis
• Probing the Majorana neutrinos and their CP violation in decays of charged scalar mesons $\pi ,K,D,D_s,B,B_c$
• Mapping the viable parameter space for testable leptogenesis
• Reinterpreting the ATLAS bounds on heavy neutral leptons in a realistic neutrino oscillation model
• Cosmological Implications of Light Sterile Neutrinos produced after the QCD Phase Transition
• Bounds on right-handed neutrino parameters from observable leptogenesis
• New Benchmark Models for Heavy Neutral Lepton Searches
• The surprising influence of late charged current weak interactions on Big Bang Nucleosynthesis
• Production of heavy sterile neutrinos from vector boson decay at electroweak temperatures
• On the Minimal Mixing of Heavy Neutrinos
• Modelling Heavy Neutral Leptons in Accelerator Beamlines
• Kinetic mixing between a Higgs and a nearly degenerate Dark scalar: oscillations and displaced vertices
• ALPs and HNLs at LHC and Muon Colliders: Uncovering New Couplings and Signals
• On the impact of heavy meson production spectra on searches for heavy neutral leptons
• Lepton number violating and conserving heavy baryon four-body decays in the presence of two almost degenerate heavy neutrinos