English

Global constraints on heavy neutrino mixing

High Energy Physics - Phenomenology 2016-12-22 v2

Abstract

We derive general constraints on the mixing of heavy Seesaw neutrinos with the SM fields from a global fit to present flavour and electroweak precision data. We explore and compare both a completely general scenario, where the heavy neutrinos are integrated out without any further assumption, and the more constrained case were only 3 additional heavy states are considered. The latter assumption implies non-trivial correlations in order to reproduce the correct neutrino masses and mixings as observed by oscillation data and thus some qualitative differences can be found with the more general scenario. The relevant processes analyzed in the global fit include searches for Lepton Flavour Violating (LFV) decays, probes of the universality of weak interactions, CKM unitarity bounds and electroweak precision data. In particular, a comparative and detailed study of the present and future sensitivity of the different LFV experiments is performed. We find a mild 12σ1-2\sigma preference for non-zero heavy neutrino mixing of order 0.03-0.04 in the electron and tau sectors. At the 2σ2\sigma level we derive bounds on all mixings ranging from 0.1 to 0.01 with the notable exception of the eμe-\mu sector with a more stringent bound of 0.005 from the μeγ\mu \to e \gamma process.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.1605.08774,
  title  = {Global constraints on heavy neutrino mixing},
  author = {Enrique Fernandez-Martinez and Josu Hernandez-Garcia and Jacobo Lopez-Pavon},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1605.08774},
  year   = {2016}
}

Comments

29 pages, 29 figures. v2: minor typos corrected. Version accepted for publication in JHEP