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An Extended Analysis of Heavy Neutral Leptons during Big Bang Nucleosynthesis
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abstract
Heavy Neutral Leptons (HNLs) are strongly motivated by theory due to their capability of simultaneously explaining the observed phenomena of dark matter, neutrino oscillations and the baryon asymmetry of the Universe. The existence of such particles would affect the expansion history of the Universe and the synthesis of primordial abundances of light elements. In this work we review, revise and extend the phenomenology of HNLs during the Big Bang Nucleosynthesis (BBN) epoch for masses up to 1 GeV. This is of great importance, as BBN is able to provide complementary bounds to those from upcoming and proposed laboratory experiments. To this end we have developed a high-precision Boltzmann code that simulates BBN in the presence of HNLs and takes into account all relevant HNL decay channels, as well as subsequent interactions of decay products (thermalization and decay showers), dilution due to QCD phase transition, active neutrino oscillations and corrections to the weak reaction rates. We present robust bounds on the lifetime and mixing angles of HNLs for masses $3\,\mathrm{MeV}\leq m_N \leq 1\,\mathrm{GeV}$ and show that BBN is able to constrain HNL lifetimes down to $0.03 - 0.05$ s, depending on the mixing pattern. Moreover, combining our results with current experimental searches, we can exclude HNLs that mix purely with electron neutrinos up to ${\sim}$450 MeV and those that mix purely with muon neutrinos up to ${\sim}$360 MeV, in both cases for lifetimes up to at least a few tens of seconds. Finally, we compare the BBN constraints with those obtained from Cosmic Microwave Background observations and explore how our results will be improved by a number of upcoming and proposed laboratory experiments.
Forward citations
Cited by 8 Pith papers
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Heavy neutral leptons beyond the BBN bound: probing the lepton asymmetry of the Universe
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Muon Bremsstrahlung as a New Probe of Dark Sector at Neutrino Experiments
Muon bremsstrahlung from the focused muon beam at neutrino facilities can produce heavy neutral leptons up to ~1 GeV, opening new search territory for SBND and DUNE Near Detector.
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Heavy neutral leptons from light scalar in fixed target and forward search experiments
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Heavy Neutral Lepton Decay Searches using Solar Neutrinos
A new differential decay width including neutral and charged current interference is used to show that future detectors could probe HNL mixing angles over two orders of magnitude below current bounds.
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In-flight annihilation of positrons produced by supernova feebly interacting particles gives the strongest astrophysical bounds on their electron couplings for masses of roughly 10-200 MeV, covering ALPs, sterile neut...
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Probing Solar Heavy Neutrinos with Heliospheric Electrons
Using Ulysses and SOHO MeV electron data, the authors set the strongest direct upper bound U_e^2 ~ 10^-6 on solar-produced heavy neutral leptons, reaching that value at a mass near 10 MeV.
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Low-scale seesaw with flavour and CP symmetries $\unicode{x2013}$ from colliders to leptogenesis
For four flavour-symmetry cases, this paper maps heavy-neutrino lifetimes, decay flavour ratios, and the parameter space where leptogenesis works and colliders can test it.
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Archimedean Seesaw: Small Neutrino Masses and Large Lepton-number Violation
A texture-zero seesaw model allows large lepton-number violation together with naturally small neutrino masses by protecting the light neutrino with an accidental symmetry.
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