Probing heavy Majorana neutrino pair production at ILC in a $U(1)_{\rm B-L}$ extension of the Standard Model

TL;DR

This paper explores the potential to detect heavy Majorana neutrino pairs at the ILC within a B-L extended Standard Model, focusing on a distinctive same-sign lepton signature to confirm their Majorana nature.

Contribution

It proposes a novel method to probe heavy Majorana neutrinos via $U(1)_{B-L}$ gauge interactions at the ILC, emphasizing the signature of same-sign leptons as evidence of their Majorana character.

Findings

Projected significance of the same-sign lepton signature at the ILC.

Constraints on B-L model parameters from LHC bounds.

Feasibility of detecting heavy Majorana neutrinos at future colliders.

Abstract

We consider a gauged B$-$L (Baryon number minus Lepton number) extension of the Standard Model (SM), which is anomaly free in the presence of three SM singlet Right Handed Neutrinos (RHNs). Associated with the $U(1)_{\rm B-L}$ gauge symmetry breaking, the RHNs acquire Majorana masses and then with the electroweak symmetry breaking, tiny Majorana masses for the SM(-like) neutrinos are naturally generated by the seesaw mechanism. As a result of the seesaw mechanism, the heavy mass eigenstates which are mainly composed of the SM-singlet RHNs obtain suppressed electroweak interactions through small mixings with the SM neutrinos. To investigate the seesaw mechanism, we study the pair production of heavy Majorana neutrinos through the $U(1)_{\rm B-L}$ gauge boson $Z^\prime$ at the 250 GeV and 500 GeV International Linear Collider (ILC). Considering the current and prospective future bounds on the B$-$L model parameters from the search for a resonant $Z^\prime$ boson production at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC), we focus on a "smoking-gun" signature of the Majorana nature of the heavy neutrinos: a final state with a pair of same-sign, same-flavor leptons, small missing momentum, and four hadronic jets. We estimate the projected significance of the signature at the ILC.