Heavy Neutral Leptons from kaon decays in the SHiP experiment

Understand

We calculate the signal rate of hypothetical heavy neutral leptons (HNL or sterile neutrinos) from kaon decays expected in the framework of the SHiP experiment.

• The kaons are produced in the hadronic shower initiated in the beam-dump mode by 400 GeV protons from CERN SPS.
• For a sufficiently light HNL (when the decays are kinematically allowed) we find kaon decays to be a noticeably richer source of HNL as compared to $D$-meson decays adopted in previous studies of the HNL phenomenology at SHiP.
• In particular, SHiP is capable of fully exploring the central part of the kinematically allowed region of the HNL mass and mixing with electron and muon neutrinos down to the lower cosmological bound.