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Luminous solar neutrinos. II. Mass-mixing portals

2021; American Physical Society; Volume: 104; Issue: 7 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1103/physrevd.104.075028

2470-0037

Ryan Plestid,

Particle physics theoretical and experimental studies

Solar neutrinos can be efficiently upscattered to MeV-scale heavy neutral leptons (HNLs) within the Earth's mantle. HNLs can then decay to electron-positron pairs leading to energy deposition inside large volume detectors. In this paper, we consider mass-portal upscattering of solar neutrinos to HNLs of mass $20\text{ }\text{ }\mathrm{MeV}\ensuremath{\ge}{m}_{N}\ensuremath{\ge}2{m}_{e}$. The large volume of the Earth compensates for the long decay length of the HNLs leading to observable rates of $N\ensuremath{\rightarrow}{\ensuremath{\nu}}_{\ensuremath{\alpha}}{e}^{+}{e}^{\ensuremath{-}}$ in large volume detectors. We find that searches for mantle-upscattered HNLs can set novel limits on mixing with third-generation leptons, $|{U}_{\ensuremath{\tau}N}|$ for masses in the MeV regime; sensitivity to mixing with first- and second-generation leptons is not competitive with existing search strategies.