Search for heavy neutrinos and W bosons with right-handed couplings in proton-proton collisions at sqrt(s) = 8 TeV

TL;DR

This paper reports a search for heavy right-handed neutrinos and W bosons in proton-proton collisions at 8 TeV, setting new exclusion limits on their masses and extending previous bounds.

Contribution

The study provides the first comprehensive search for right-handed neutrinos and W bosons at 8 TeV, significantly extending the exclusion region in the mass plane.

Findings

Excluded W boson masses up to approximately 3.0 TeV at 95% confidence level.

Set new limits on neutrino masses below the W boson mass.

Extended the previous exclusion regions in the (M[WR], M[N]) parameter space.

Abstract

A search for heavy, right-handed neutrinos, N[l] (l = e, mu), and right-handed WR bosons, which arise in the left-right symmetric extensions of the standard model, has been performed by the CMS experiment. The search was based on a sample of two lepton plus two jet events collected in proton-proton collisions at a center-of-mass energy of 8 TeV corresponding to an integrated luminosity of 19.7 inverse femtobarns. For models with strict left-right symmetry, and assuming only one N[l] flavor contributes significantly to the WR decay width, the region in the two-dimensional (M[WR], M[N]) mass plane excluded at a 95% confidence level extends to approximately M[WR] = 3.0 TeV and covers a large range of neutrino masses below the WR boson mass, depending on the value of M[WR]. This search significantly extends the (M[WR], M[N]) exclusion region beyond previous results.