Heavy Neutral Leptons from Stopped Muons and Pions

Abstract

Stopped muons, which are generic in pion-at-rest experiments, can shed light on heavy neutral leptons (HNLs) in unexplored parameter spaces. If the HNL is lighter than the muon, the HNL can be produced from decays of muons and pions.The HNL will travel from the production location and decay into visible Standard Model (SM) modes, leaving signals inside downstream detectors. We find that in the case that the HNL dominantly mixes with muon neutrinos, the LSND constraint on the mixing angle squared is stronger than all the previous constraints by more than an order of magnitude. In this study, we recast the LSND measurement of the $\nu -e$ scattering. Future experiments such as PIP2-BD could further improve the sensitivity, provided they can distinguish the HNL events from backgrounds induced by the SM neutrinos.

Comments: 13 pages, 2 figures