The search for electroweak-scale right-handed neutrinos and mirror charged leptons through like-sign dilepton signals

Abstract

The existence of tiny neutrino masses at a scale more than a million times smaller than the lightest charged fermion mass, namely the electron, and their mixings can not be explained within the framework of the exceptionally successful Standard Model. There are four ideas that has been proposed to explain the tiny neutrino masses. These include the see-saw mechanism with a right handed neutrino at the GUT scale, and this is the most elegant mechanism. The other mechanisms are radiatively generated neutrino masses, the neutrino mass arising from a 2nd Higgs doublet having a tiny VEV and coupling only to the neutrinos, and finally the mirror model or simply the EW-scale $\nu_R$ model. The mirror model has new quarks and leptons of opposite chirality at the electroweak scale (for the same Standard Model gauge symmetry $SU(2)_W \times U(1)_Y$) compared to what we have for the Standard Model. With suitable modification of the Higgs sector, the EW-scale $\nu_R$ model satisfies the electroweak precision test and also the constraints coming from the observed 125-GeV Higgs scalar. Since in this model, the mirror fermions are required to be in the EW scale, these can be produced at the LHC giving final states with a very low background from the SM. One such final state is the same sign dileptons with large missing $p_T$ for the events. In this work, we explore the constraint provided by the $8$ TeV data, and prospect of observing this signal in the $13$ TeV runs at the LHC. Additional signals will be the presence of displaced vertices depending on the smallness of the Yukawa couplings of the mirror leptons with the ordinary leptons and the singlet Higgs present in the model. Of particular importance to the EW-scale $\nu_R$ model is the production of $\nu_R$ which will be a direct test of the seesaw mechanism at collider energies.