Luminous solar neutrinos II: Mass-mixing portals

Abstract

Solar neutrinos can be efficiently upscattered to MeV scale heavy neutral leptons (HNLs) within the Earth's mantle. HNLs can then decay to electron-positron pairs leading to energy deposition inside large-volume detectors. In this paper we consider mass-portal upscattering of solar neutrinos to HNLs of mass 20 MeV $\ge m_N\ge 2m_e$. The large volume of the Earth compensates for the long decay-length of the HNLs leading to observable rates of $N\to {\nu }_{\alpha }{e}^{+}{e}^{-}$ in large volume detectors. We find that searches for mantle-upscattered HNLs can set the novel limits on mixing with third generation leptons, $|U_{\tau N}|$ for masses in the MeV regime; sensitivity to mixing with first- and second-generation leptons is not competitive with existing search strategies.

arXiv comment5 pages, companion paper to arXiv:2010.04193 | Discussion of BBN constraints added, small cosmetic changes, typos corrected

References in corpus (37)

• The chemical composition of the Sun
• The $\nu$MSM, Dark Matter and Baryon Asymmetry of the Universe
• The $\nu$MSM, Dark Matter and Neutrino Masses
• The Search for Heavy Majorana Neutrinos
• The role of sterile neutrinos in cosmology and astrophysics
• Exploring Portals to a Hidden Sector Through Fixed Targets
• FASER: ForwArd Search ExpeRiment at the LHC
• Long-Lived Particles at the Energy Frontier: The MATHUSLA Physics Case
• The Phenomenology of Right Handed Neutrinos
• How to find neutral leptons of the nuMSM?
• Solar Neutrino Measurements in Super-Kamiokande-IV
• Exploring nu signals in dark matter detectors
• Solar models with accretion. I. Application to the solar abundance problem
• Phenomenology of GeV-scale Heavy Neutral Leptons
• Dark Neutrino Portal to Explain MiniBooNE excess
• Dipole portal to heavy neutral leptons
• Global Constraints on a Heavy Neutrino
• Heavy Neutral Leptons at FASER
• Search for heavy neutrinos at Belle
• The Neutrino Magnetic Moment Portal: Cosmology, Astrophysics, and Direct Detection
• Limits on the Mixing of Tau Neutrino to Heavy Neutrinos
• Searches for Decays of New Particles in the DUNE Multi-Purpose Near Detector
• Heavy Neutral Leptons from low-scale seesaws at the DUNE Near Detector
• Dark Neutrinos and a Three Portal Connection to the Standard Model
• An Extended Analysis of Heavy Neutral Leptons during Big Bang Nucleosynthesis
• Luminous Dark Matter
• Heavy neutral leptons at ANUBIS
• Hunting On- and Off-Axis for Light Dark Matter with DUNE-PRISM
• A simple analytic three-flavour description of the day-night effect in the solar neutrino flux
• Dark matter detection in two easy steps
• New limits on heavy sterile neutrino mixing in ${}^8\mathrm{B}$-decay obtained with the Borexino detector
• Luminous solar neutrinos I: Dipole portals
• Hydrogen portal to exotic radioactivity
• Extending Sensitivity for Low-Mass Neutral Heavy Lepton Searches
• Searches for Atmospheric Long-Lived Particles
• Luminous Signals of Inelastic Dark Matter in Large Detectors
• Rates and differential distributions in heavy neutral leptons production and decays

Cited by in corpus (5)

• Luminous solar neutrinos I: Dipole portals
• Heavy Neutrino searches through Double-Bang Events at Super-Kamiokande, DUNE, and Hyper-Kamiokande
• Three-Body Decays of Heavy Dirac and Majorana Fermions
• Neutrino Portals, Terrestrial Upscattering, and Atmospheric Neutrinos
• Characterizing Heavy Neutral Fermions via their Decays