Limits on heavy neutral leptons, $Z^{\prime }$ bosons and majorons from high-energy supernova neutrinos

Abstract

Light hypothetical particles with masses up to $\mathcal{O}(100)\mathrm{MeV}$ can be produced in the core of supernovae. Their subsequent decays to neutrinos can produce a flux component with higher energies than the standard flux. We study the impact of heavy neutral leptons, $Z^{\prime }$ bosons, in particular ${\mathrm{U}(1)}_{L_{\mu }-L_{\tau }}$ and ${\mathrm{U}(1)}_{B-L}$ gauge bosons, and majorons coupled to neutrinos flavor-dependently. We obtain new strong limits on these particles from no events of high-energy SN 1987A neutrinos and their future sensitivities from observations of galactic supernova neutrinos.

Comments: 21 pages, 5 figures, 2 tables. v2: results of heavy neutral leptons mixing with ${\nu }_e$ added, mistake about the principle of the detailed balance corrected, figure 2 changed, typos corrected, references and comments added. v3: Matches the published version in JHEP