Optimal search reach for heavy neutral leptons at a muon collider

Abstract

Neutrinos are the most elusive particles known. Heavier sterile neutrinos mixing with the standard neutrinos might solve the mystery of the baryon asymmetry of the universe. In this letter, we show that among all future energy frontier accelerators, muon colliders will provide the farthest search reach for such neutrinos for mass ranges above the Z pole into the multi-TeV regime, becoming the optimal machine for this kind of studies. We compare the performance of muon with electron colliders of the same machine energy and briefly discuss the complementarity in flavor space between the two types of accelerators.

Topics & Concepts