Search for Heavy Right Handed Neutrinos at the FCC-ee

AbstractThe Standard Model of particle physics is still lacking an understanding of the generation and nature of neutrino masses. A favorite theoretical scenario (the see-saw mechanism) is that both Dirac and Majorana mass terms are present, leading to the existence of heavy partners of the light neutrinos, presumably massive and nearly sterile. These heavy neutrinos can be searched for at high energy lepton colliders of very high luminosity, such as the Future electron-positron e+e− Circular Collider, FCC-ee (TLEP), presently studied within the Future Circular Collider design study at CERN, as a possible first step. A first look at sensitivities, both from neutrino counting and from direct search for heavy neutrino decay, are presented. The number of neutrinos Nν should be measurable with a precision of ΔNν≈±(0.0004–0.0010), while the direct search appears very promising due to the long lifetime of heavy neutrinos for small mixing angles. A sensitivity down to a heavy-light mixing of |U|2≃10−12 is obtained, covering a large phase space for heavy neutrino masses between 10 and 80 GeV/c2