Light sterile neutrinos and lepton-number-violating kaon decays in effective field theory

Abstract

We investigate lepton-number-violating decays $K^{\mp }\to {\pi }^{\pm }{l}^{\mp }{l}^{\mp }$ in the presence of sterile neutrinos. We consider minimal interactions with Standard-Model fields through Yukawa couplings as well as higher-dimensional operators in the framework of the neutrino-extended Standard Model Effective Field Theory. We use $SU(3)$ chiral perturbation theory to match to mesonic interactions and compute the lepton-number-violating decay rate in terms of the neutrino masses and the Wilson coefficients of higher-dimensional operators. For neutrinos that can be produced on-shell, the decay rates are highly enhanced and higher-dimensional interactions can be probed up to very high scales around $\mathcal{O}$(30) TeV.

Comments: 31 pages, 6 figures