English

Bounds on lepton non-unitarity and heavy neutrino mixing

High Energy Physics - Phenomenology 2023-06-05 v1 High Energy Physics - Experiment

Abstract

We present an updated and improved global fit analysis of current flavor and electroweak precision observables to derive bounds on unitarity deviations of the leptonic mixing matrix and on the mixing of heavy neutrinos with the active flavours. This new analysis is motivated by new and updated experimental results on key observables such as VudV_{ud}, the invisible decay width of the ZZ boson and the WW boson mass. It also improves upon previous studies by considering the full correlations among the different observables and explicitly calibrating the test statistic, which may present significant deviations from a χ2\chi^2 distribution. The results are provided for three different Type-I seesaw scenarios: the minimal scenario with only two additional right-handed neutrinos, the next to minimal one with three extra neutrinos, and the most general one with an arbitrary number of heavy neutrinos that we parametrize via a generic deviation from a unitary leptonic mixing matrix. Additionally, we also analyze the case of generic deviations from unitarity of the leptonic mixing matrix, not necessarily induced by the presence of additional neutrinos. This last case relaxes some correlations among the parameters and is able to provide a better fit to the data. Nevertheless, inducing only leptonic unitarity deviations avoiding both the correlations implied by the right-handed neutrino extension as well as more strongly constrained operators is challenging and would imply significantly more complex UV completions.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2306.01040,
  title  = {Bounds on lepton non-unitarity and heavy neutrino mixing},
  author = {Mattias Blennow and Enrique Fernández-Martínez and Josu Hernández-García and Jacobo López-Pavón and Xabier Marcano and Daniel Naredo-Tuero},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2306.01040},
  year   = {2023}
}

Comments

27 pages + appendices, 7 figures, 7 tables