Neutral heavy lepton production at next high energy $e^{+}{e}^{-}$ linear colliders

Abstract

The discovery potential for detecting new heavy Majorana and Dirac neutrinos at some recently proposed high energy $e^{+}{e}^{-}$ colliders is discussed. These new particles are suggested by grand unified theories and superstring-inspired models. For these models the production of a single heavy neutrino is shown to be more relevant than pair production when comparing cross sections and neutrino mass ranges. The process $e^{+}{e}^{-}⟶\nu e^{\pm }{W}^{\mp }$ is calculated including on-shell and off-shell heavy neutrino effects. We present a detailed study of cross sections and distributions that shows a clear separation between the signal and standard model contributions, even after including hadronization effects.

Comments: 4 pages including 15 figures, 1 table. RevTex. Accepted in Physical Review D