Search for heavy Majorana neutrinos in e+/- e+/- plus jets and e+/- mu+/- plus jets events in proton-proton collisions at sqrt(s) = 8 TeV

TL;DR

This study searches for heavy Majorana neutrinos in proton-proton collisions at 8 TeV, setting new limits on their production and mixing with standard neutrinos, using CMS data and analyzing specific lepton-jet signatures.

Contribution

First search for heavy Majorana neutrinos in specific lepton plus jets channels at 8 TeV, providing the most restrictive limits above 200 GeV.

Findings

No excess observed over SM background.

Set upper limits on cross section times branching fraction.

Constrained neutrino mixing parameters.

Abstract

A search is performed for heavy Majorana neutrinos (N) decaying into a W boson and a lepton using the CMS detector at the Large Hadron Collider. A signature of two jets and either two same sign electrons or a same sign electron-muon pair is searched for using 19.7 inverse femtobarns of data collected during 2012 in proton-proton collisions at a centre-of-mass energy of 8 TeV. The data are found to be consistent with the expected standard model (SM) background and, in the context of a Type-1 seesaw mechanism, upper limits are set on the cross section times branching fraction for production of heavy Majorana neutrinos in the mass range between 40 and 500 GeV. The results are additionally interpreted as limits on the mixing between the heavy Majorana neutrinos and the SM neutrinos. In the mass range considered, the upper limits range between 0.00015 - 0.72 for |V[eN]|^2 and 6.6E-5 - 0.47 for |V[eN] V*[muN]|^2 / ( |V[eN]|^2 + |V[muN]|^2 ), where V[lN] is the mixing element describing the mixing of the heavy neutrino with the SM neutrino of flavour l. These limits are the most restrictive direct limits for heavy Majorana neutrino masses above 200 GeV.