English

Future collider sensitivities to $\nu$SMEFT interactions

High Energy Physics - Phenomenology 2025-05-19 v2

Abstract

The discovery of neutrino oscillations and masses provides strong motivation to extend the Standard Model by including right-handed neutrinos, which lead to heavy neutrino states that could exist at the electroweak scale. These states may also be influenced by new high-scale, weakly interacting physics. Incorporating right-handed neutrinos into an effective field theory framework -- the ν\nuSMEFT -- offers a systematic approach to study the phenomenology of heavy neutrinos in current and upcoming experiments. In this work, we present the first prospective 95\% exclusion plots achievable at a future lepton collider operating at a center-of-mass energy of s=0.5 TeV\sqrt{s}=0.5 ~\rm{TeV} for what we term the agnostic ν\nuSMEFT scenario. This study focuses on the high-mass regime where the heavy neutrino NN decays promptly into leptons and jets. Specifically, we analyze the processes e+eνNνμμ+νe^+e^- \to \nu N \to \nu \mu^{-} \mu^{+} \nu and e+eνNνμjje^+e^- \to \nu N \to \nu \mu^{-} \mathrm{j} \mathrm{j}, deriving the exclusion regions in the αΛ2\frac{\alpha}{\Lambda^2} vs. mNm_N parameter space. When compared to prospective limits for the LHeC, we find that the semi-leptonic process with final jets in a lepton collider offers the greatest sensitivity, even with a straightforward cut-based analysis. The expected bounds are as stringent as those considered in recent studies for the low-mass regime where the NN may be long-lived and detectable via displaced decay searches, both at the LHC and future colliders.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2501.07618,
  title  = {Future collider sensitivities to $\nu$SMEFT interactions},
  author = {Lucía Duarte and Daniel Chalençon Maisian and Tomás Urruzola},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2501.07618},
  year   = {2025}
}

Comments

24 pages, 7 figures. Improved version accepted for publication in Journal of Physics G

R2 v1 2026-06-28T21:05:07.755Z