The MicroBooNE Experiment, the NuMI Absorber, and Heavy Neutral Leptons

Abstract

Motivated by the recent search for a Higgs-Portal Scalar decaying inside the MicroBooNE detector, we demonstrate that the same search can be used to constrain Heavy Neutral Leptons. These are gauge-singlet fermions that interact with the Standard Model by mixing with neutrinos only and could be related to the origin of neutrino masses. By recasting the results of the MicroBooNE Collaboration's analysis, we show that, for a Heavy Neutral Lepton that mixes predominantly with muon-flavored neutrinos, previously unexplored parameter space can be excluded for masses between 30 and 150 MeV. Additionally, we make our Monte Carlo tools publicly available.

arXiv comment5 pages plus references, 4 figures. Monte Carlo code available at https://github.com/kjkellyphys/muBHNL. v2: Updated references, typo in equation fixed (results unchanged), matches published version

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Cited by in corpus (17)

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• Heavy neutral leptons below the kaon mass at hodoscopic detectors
• Recasting Bounds on Long-lived Heavy Neutral Leptons in Terms of a Light Supersymmetric R-parity Violating Neutralino
• Low-scale leptogenesis with flavour and CP symmetries
• Modelling Heavy Neutral Leptons in Accelerator Beamlines
• Heavy Neutral Leptons at Beam Dump Experiments of Future Lepton Colliders
• Non-Minimal Approximation for the Type-I Seesaw Mechanism
• Searching for axions with kaon decay at rest
• Discovering the Origin of Neutrino Masses at SHiP
• Mass Reconstruction of Heavy Neutral Leptons from Stopped Mesons
• Right handed neutrino production from $Z^{\prime }$ interactions in forward search experiments
• Search for heavy neutral leptons in electron-positron and neutral-pion final states with the MicroBooNE detector
• Testable dark matter solution within the seesaw mechanism
• Enhancing the Sensitivity to Seesaw Predictions in Gauged $B-L$ Scenarios
• Semi-Visible Dark Photon Phenomenology at the GeV Scale
• Characterizing Heavy Neutral Fermions via their Decays