Effective portals to heavy neutral leptons

Understand

The existence of right-handed neutrinos, or heavy neutral leptons (HNLs), is strongly motivated by the observation of neutrino masses and mixing.

• The mass of these new particles could lie below the electroweak scale, making them accessible to low-energy laboratory experiments.
• Additional new physics at high energies can mediate new interactions between the Standard Model particles and HNLs, and is most conveniently parametrized by the neutrino Standard Model Effective Field Theory, or $\nu$SMEFT for short.
• In this work, we consider the dimension six $\nu$SMEFT operators involving one HNL field in the mass range of $\mathcal{O}(1)$ MeV $<M_N< \mathcal{O}(100)$ GeV.