Search for heavy neutral leptons with the CMS detector

Abstract

The smallness of neutrino masses provides a tantalizing allusion to physics beyond the standard model. Heavy neutral leptons ($N$), such as hypothetical sterile neutrinos, accommodate a way to explain this observation, through the see-saw mechanism. If they exist, $N$ could also provide answers about the nature of dark matter, and the baryon asymmetry of the universe. A search for the production of $N$ at the LHC, originating from leptonic W boson decays through the mixing of $N$ with SM neutrinos, is presented. The search focuses on signatures with three leptons, providing a clean signal for probing the production of $N$ in a wide mass range never explored before at the LHC: down to 1 GeV, and up to 1.2 TeV. The sample of proton-proton collisions collected by the CMS detector throughout 2016 is used, amounting to a volume of 35.9 $\text{fb}^{-1}$. The results are presented in the plane of the mixing parameter of $N$ to their SM counterparts, versus their mass, and are the first such result at a hadron collider for masses below 40 GeV and the first direct result for masses above 500 GeV, more than doubling the probed mass range.