Search for heavy Majorana or Dirac neutrinos and right-handed $W$ gauge bosons in final states with two charged leptons and two jets at $\sqrt{s}$ = 13 TeV with the ATLAS detector

TL;DR

This paper reports a search for heavy right-handed neutrinos and $W_R$ bosons in proton-proton collisions at 13 TeV, finding no deviations from the Standard Model and setting mass exclusion limits up to 4.7 TeV.

Contribution

It provides the first limits on heavy right-handed neutrinos and $W_R$ bosons in the specified final state at 13 TeV, extending previous mass exclusion bounds.

Findings

No significant excess observed over Standard Model predictions.

Excluded $W_R$ masses up to 4.7 TeV for both Majorana and Dirac neutrinos.

Set new lower limits on heavy neutrino masses in the context of left-right symmetric models.

Abstract

A search for heavy right-handed Majorana or Dirac neutrinos $N_R$ and heavy right-handed gauge bosons $W_R$ is performed in events with a pair of energetic electrons or muons, with the same or opposite electric charge, and two energetic jets. The events are selected from $pp$ collision data with an integrated luminosity of 36.1 fb$^{-1}$ collected by the ATLAS detector at $\sqrt{s}$ = 13 TeV. No significant deviations from the Standard Model are observed. The results are interpreted within the theoretical framework of a left-right symmetric model and lower limits are set on masses in the heavy right-handed $W$ boson and neutrino mass plane. The excluded region extends to $m_{W_R}=4.7$ TeV for both Majorana and Dirac $N_R$ neutrinos.