Long-lived Sterile Neutrinos at the LHC in Effective Field Theory

TL;DR

This paper explores the potential of detecting long-lived sterile neutrinos at the LHC and future experiments using displaced-vertex signatures within the $ u$SMEFT framework, considering both standard mixing and higher-dimensional operators.

Contribution

It introduces a comprehensive analysis of sterile neutrino production and decay via EFT operators at colliders, extending beyond minimal mixing scenarios.

Findings

High-luminosity LHC experiments can effectively probe EFT operators for sterile neutrinos.

Displaced-vertex searches are highly sensitive to sterile neutrinos produced in meson decays.

Future experiments like MATHUSLA and FASER have competitive reach for long-lived sterile neutrinos.

Abstract

We study the prospects of a displaced-vertex search of sterile neutrinos at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) in the framework of the neutrino-extended Standard Model Effective Field Theory ($\nu$SMEFT). The production and decay of sterile neutrinos can proceed via the standard active-sterile neutrino mixing in the weak current, as well as through higher-dimensional operators arising from decoupled new physics. If sterile neutrinos are long-lived, their decay can lead to displaced vertices which can be reconstructed. We investigate the search sensitivities for the ATLAS/CMS detector, the future far-detector experiments: AL3X, ANUBIS, CODEX-b, FASER, MATHUSLA, and MoEDAL-MAPP, and at the proposed fixed-target experiment SHiP. We study scenarios where sterile neutrinos are predominantly produced via rare charm and bottom mesons decays through minimal mixing and/or dimension-six operators in the $\nu$SMEFT Lagrangian. We perform simulations to determine the potential reach of high-luminosity LHC experiments in probing the EFT operators, finding that these experiments are very competitive with other searches.