Blast from the past II: Constraints on heavy neutral leptons from the BEBC WA66 beam dump experiment

Abstract

We revisit the search for heavy neutral leptons with the Big European Bubble Chamber in the 1982 proton beam dump experiment at CERN, focussing on those heavier than the kaon and mixing only with the tau neutrino, as these are far less constrained than their counterparts with smaller mass or other mixings. Recasting the previous search in terms of this model and including additional production and decay channels yields the strongest bounds to date, up to the tau mass. This applies also to our updated bounds on the mixing of heavy neutral leptons with the electron neutrino.

15 pages, 5 figures; Code available at: https://github.com/ryanbarouki/HNL_Dump. Published in SciPost

References in corpus (7)

• Sterile Neutrinos
• The Search for Feebly-Interacting Particles
• Heavy Flavour Hadro-Production from Fixed-Target to Collider Energies
• Improved BBN constraints on Heavy Neutral Leptons
• Blast from the past: Constraints on the dark sector from the BEBC WA66 beam dump experiment
• Heavy neutral leptons below the kaon mass at hodoscopic detectors
• New constraints on tau-coupled Heavy Neutral Leptons with masses $m_N=280-970$ MeV

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