Probing heavy triplet leptons of the type-III seesaw mechanism at future muon colliders

Abstract

We study the search potential of heavy triplet leptons in Type III Seesaw mechanism at future high-energy and high-luminosity muon colliders. The impact of up-to-date neutrino oscillation results is taken into account on neutrino parameters and the consequent decay patterns of heavy leptons in Type III Seesaw. The three heavy leptons in the Casas-Ibarra parametrization with diagonal unity matrix are distinguishable in their decay modes. We consider the pair production of charged triplet leptons $E^{+}{E}^{-}$ through both ${\mu }^{+}{\mu }^{-}$ annihilation and vector boson fusion (VBF) processes. The leading-order framework of electroweak parton distribution functions are utilized to calculate the VBF cross sections. The charged triplet leptons can be probed for masses above $\sim 1$ TeV. The $E^{+}{E}^{-}\to ZZ{\ell }^{+}{\ell }^{-}$ channel can be further utilized to fully reconstruct the three triplet leptons and distinguish neutrino mass patterns. The pair production of heavy neutrinos $N$ and the associated production $E^{\pm }N$ are only induced by VBF processes and lead to lepton-number-violating (LNV) signature. We also study the search potential of LNV processes at future high-energy muon collider with $\sqrt{s}=30$ TeV.

Comments: 22 pages, 14 figures, 1 table. Version accepted for publication in PRD, some typos corrected