Detecting a heavy neutrino electric dipole moment at the LHC

Abstract

The milliQan Collaboration has proposed to search for millicharged particles by looking for very weakly ionizing tracks in a detector installed in a cavern near the CMS experiment at the LHC. We note that another form of exotica can also yield weakly ionizing tracks. If a heavy neutrino has an electric dipole moment (EDM), then the milliQan experiment may be sensitive to it as well. In particular, writing the general dimension-5 operator for an EDM with a scale of a TeV and a one-loop factor, one finds a potential EDM as high as a few times $10^{-17}$ e-cm, and models exist where it is an order of magnitude higher. Redoing the Bethe calculation of ionization energy loss for an EDM, it is found that the milliQan detector is sensitive to EDMs as small as $10^{-17}$ e-cm. Using the production cross-section and analyzing the acceptance of the milliQan detector, we find the expected $95\%$ exclusion and $3\sigma$ sensitivity over the range of neutrino masses from $5-1000$ GeV for integrated luminosities of $300$ and $3000{\mathrm{fb}}^{-1}$ at the LHC.

arXiv comment5 pages, 1 figure, version accepted for publication in PLB

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Cited by in corpus (8)

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• Dark sector-photon interactions in proton-beam experiments
• Searching for Heavy Neutrinos with the MoEDAL-MAPP Detector at the LHC
• LHC experiments for long-lived particles of the dark sector
• The Forward Physics Facility at the High-Luminosity LHC