Higgs production from sterile neutrinos at future lepton colliders

• Published in: The journal of high energy physics Vol. 2016; no. 4; pp. 1 - 28
• Main Authors: Antusch, Stefan, Cazzato, Eros, Fischer, Oliver
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: Berlin/Heidelberg Springer Berlin Heidelberg 01.04.2016
• Subjects: Accounting; Approximation; Classical and Quantum Gravitation; Computer simulation; Couplings; Deviation; Elementary Particles; Higgs bosons; Leptons; Neutrinos; Physics; Physics and Astronomy; Quantum Field Theories; Quantum Field Theory; Quantum Physics; Regular Article - Theoretical Physics; Relativity Theory; String Theory; Neutrino Physics; Beyond Standard Model; Higgs Physics
• ISSN: 1029-8479; 1029-8479
• DOI: 10.1007/JHEP04(2016)189

A bstract In scenarios with sterile (right-handed) neutrinos that are subject to an approximate “lepton-number-like” symmetry, the heavy neutrinos (i.e. the mass eigenstates) can have masses around the electroweak scale and couple to the Higgs boson with, in principle, unsuppressed Yukawa couplings while accounting for the smallness of the light neutrinos’ masses. In these scenarios, the on-shell production of heavy neutrinos and their subsequent decays into a light neutrino and a Higgs boson constitutes a hitherto unstudied resonant contribution to the Higgs production mechanism. We investigate the relevance of this resonant mono-Higgs production mechanism in leptonic collisions, including thepresent experimental constraints on the neutrino Yukawa couplings, and we determine the sensitivity of future lepton colliders to the heavy neutrinos. With Monte Carlo event sampling and a simulation of the detector response we find that, at future lepton colliders, neutrino Yukawa couplings below the percent level can lead to observable deviations from the SM and, furthermore, the sensitivity improves with higher center-of-mass energies (for identical integrated luminosities).