New avenues for the neutrino dipole portal exploration at the energy frontier

TL;DR

This paper explores the potential of future colliders like HL-LHC, FCC-hh, and a 10 TeV muon collider to detect sterile neutrinos via their electromagnetic dipole interactions, focusing on novel signatures and sensitivity projections.

Contribution

It provides a comprehensive, gauge-invariant analysis of the neutrino dipole portal at high energies, including new collider signatures and sensitivity estimates for upcoming experiments.

Findings

FCC-hh can probe dipole couplings down to 6×10^{-7} GeV^{-1}

Muon collider sensitivity reaches 2×10^{-7} GeV^{-1}

Electroweak boson-initiated processes dominate at high masses

Abstract

We present a comprehensive and gauge-invariant study of the neutrino dipole portal at the energy frontier. Assuming negligible active-sterile mixing, we analyze sterile neutrino production via dimension-6 dipole operators coupling to the electroweak field strengths. The analysis incorporates both single- and double-gauge-boson effective interactions. We investigate novel collider signatures at the HL-LHC, the FCC-hh -- studied here in this context for the first time -- and a 10 TeV muon collider. Particular emphasis is placed on electroweak boson-initiated processes, which dominate in the high-mass regime above $\sim$1 TeV. At the muon collider, these VBF-like topologies enable production even when the dipole couples to non-muonic flavors, offering a unique and sensitive probe for different flavor scenarios. We derive sensitivity projections for various theoretical benchmarks, reaching dipole couplings down to $d_{\gamma}\sim 6\times10^{-7}$ GeV$^{-1}$ at FCC-hh and $d_{\gamma}\sim 2\times10^{-7}$ GeV$^{-1}$ at the muon collider.