Direct Detection Experiments at the Neutrino Dipole Portal Frontier

Heavy sterile neutrinos are typically invoked to accommodate the observed neutrino masses, by positing a new Yukawa term connecting these new states to the neutrinos in the electroweak doublet. However, given our ignorance of the neutrino sector we should explore additional interactions such sterile neutrinos may have with the SM. In this paper, we study the dimension-5 operator which couples the heavy state to a light neutrino and the photon. We find that the recent XENON1T direct detection data can improve the limits on this "Neutrino Dipole Portal" by up to an order of magnitude over previous bounds. Future direct detection experiments may be able to extend these bounds down to the level probed by SN1987A.