On the Minimal Mixing of Heavy Neutrinos

Abstract

We revisit the constraints on the properties of right handed neutrinos from the requirement to explain the observed light neutrino oscillation data in the type-I seesaw model. We use well-known relations to show that there is in general no lower bound on the mixing of a given heavy neutrino with any individual Standard Model generation. Lower bounds quoted in the literature only apply if the masses of the heavy neutrinos are so degenerate that they cannot be distinguished experimentally. A lower bound on the total mixing (summed over Standard Model generations) can be derived for each heavy neutrino individually, but it strongly depends on the mass of the lightest Standard Model neutrino and on the number of heavy neutrinos that contribute to the seesaw mechanism. Our results have implications for the perspectives of future colliders or fixed target experiments to rule out certain mass ranges for heavy neutrinos.