English

The physics case for neutrino-neutrino collisions

High Energy Physics - Phenomenology 2023-12-12 v5 High Energy Physics - Experiment

Abstract

Addressing the mass origin and properties of neutrinos is of strong interest to particle physics, baryogenesis and cosmology. Popular explanations involve physics beyond the standard model, for example, the dimension-5 Weinberg operator or heavy Majorana neutrinos arising from ``seesaw'' models. The current best direct limits on the electron neutrino mass, derived from nuclei beta decay or neutrinoless double beta decay processes, are at the sub-electronvolt level. Here we propose a novel neutrino neutrino collider where the neutrino beam is generated from TeV scale muon decays. Such collisions can happen between either neutrinos and anti-neutrinos, or neutrinos and neutrinos. We find that with a tiny integrated luminosity of about 10510^{-5}/fb we can already expect to observe direct neutrino anti-neutrino annihilation, ννˉZ\nu\bar{\nu}\rightarrow {\rm Z}, which also opens the door to explore neutrino related resonances ννˉX\nu\bar{\nu}\rightarrow {\rm X}. The low luminosity requirement can accommodate a relatively large emittance muon beam. Such a device would also allow for probing heavy Majorana neutrino and effective Majorana neutrino mass through ννHH\nu\nu\rightarrow {\rm H H} to a competitive level, for both electron and muon types.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2205.15350,
  title  = {The physics case for neutrino-neutrino collisions},
  author = {Sitian Qian and Tianyi Yang and Sen Deng and Jie Xiao and Leyun Gao and Andrew Michael Levin and Qiang Li and Meng Lu and Zhengyun You},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2205.15350},
  year   = {2023}
}

Comments

5 pages, 4 figures, Xsec plot, luminosity estimation updated; Further updates to address comments received