Heavy neutral leptons at FASER
Felix Kling (Department of Physics and Astronomy, University of California, Irvine, California 92697-4575, USA); Sebastian Trojanowski (National Centre for Nuclear Research, Hoża 69, 00-681 Warsaw, Poland, Department of Physics and Astronomy, University of California, Irvine, California 92697-4575, USA)
We study the prospects for discovering heavy neutral leptons at Forward Search Experiment (FASER), the newly proposed detector at the LHC. Previous studies showed that a relatively small detector with length and cross sectional area can probe large unconstrained parts of parameter space for dark photons and dark Higgs bosons. In this work, we show that FASER will also be sensitive to heavy neutral leptons that have mixing angles with the active neutrinos that are up to an order of magnitude lower than current bounds. In particular, this is true for heavy neutral leptons produced dominantly in -meson decays, in which case FASER’s discovery potential is comparable to the proposed SHiP detector. We also illustrate how the search for heavy neutral leptons at FASER will be complementary to ongoing searches in high- experiments at the LHC and can shed light on the nature of dark matter and the process of baryogenesis in the early Universe.
