Long-lived heavy neutral leptons with a displaced shower signature at CMS

Abstract

We study the LHC discovery potential in the search for heavy neutral leptons (HNL) with a new signature: a displaced shower in the CMS muon detector, giving rise to a large cluster of hits forming a displaced shower. A new Delphes module is used to model the CMS detector response for such displaced decays. We reinterpret a dedicated CMS search for neutral long-lived particles decaying in the CMS muon endcap detectors for the minimal HNL scenario. We demonstrate that this new strategy is particularly sensitive to active-sterile mixings with $\tau$ leptons, due to hadronic $\tau$ decays. HNL masses between $\sim 1 - 6$ GeV can be accessed for mixings as low as $|V_{\tau N}|^{2}\sim 10^{-7}$, probing unique regions of parameter space in the $\tau$ sector.