Long-lived heavy neutral leptons with a displaced shower signature at CMS
G. Cottin, Juan Carlos Helo, M. Hirsch, Cristián Peña, C. Wang, S. Xie
Abstract
A bstract We study the LHC discovery potential in the search for heavy neutral leptons (HNL) with a new signature: a displaced shower in the CMS muon detector, giving rise to a large cluster of hits forming a displaced shower. A new Delphes module is used to model the CMS detector response for such displaced decays. We reinterpret a dedicated CMS search for neutral long-lived particles decaying in the CMS muon endcap detectors for the minimal HNL scenario. We demonstrate that this new strategy is particularly sensitive to active-sterile mixings with τ leptons, due to hadronic τ decays. HNL masses between ~ 1–6 GeV can be accessed for mixings as low as | V τN | 2 ~10 −7 , probing unique regions of parameter space in the τ sector.