Probing Lepton Number Violation and Majorana Nature of Neutrinos at the LHC

Abstract

Observation of lepton number ($L$) violation by two units at colliders would provide evidence for the Majorana nature of neutrinos. We study signals of $L$-violation in the context of two popular models of neutrino masses, the type-II seesaw model and the Zee model, wherein small neutrino masses arise at the tree-level and one-loop level, respectively. We focus on $L$-violation signals at the LHC arising through the process $pp\to {\ell }^{\pm }{\ell }^{\prime \pm }$ + jets within these frameworks. We obtain sensitivity to $L$-violation in the type-II seesaw model for triplet scalar masses up to 700 GeV and in the Zee model for charged scalar masses up to 4.8 TeV at the high-luminosity LHC with an integrated luminosity of $3{\text{ab}}^{-1}$.

Comments: 10 pages, 8 figures, and 1 table