Hunting for sterile neutrino with future collider signatures

Abstract

We study the feasibility to observe sterile neutrino at the high energy colliders with direct production channels through $e^+e^-$, $ep$ collision, and indirect production channels through decays of heavy meson, baryon and Higgs. For $e^+e^-$ collision, the $e^+e^-\to\bar{\nu}_e N$ channel is explored with new signal selection method which tends to be efficient for light $m_N$, the constraints of active-sterile mixing $|U_{eN}|^2$ at the SuperKEKB, CEPC and ILC are expected to reach better lower limits than current experiments. For $ep$ collision, We investigate the heavy sterile neutrino production through a new channel via proton bremsstrahlung, i.e., $e^-\gamma \to NW^-$, hundreds of GeV heavy sterile neutrino can be probe and new limit on mixing is given. For heavy hadrons decay, the lepton-number-violating decays of $\Lambda_c,\ \Xi_{c},\ \Xi_{cc}$ and $\Lambda_b$ are explored via an intermediate on-shell Majorana neutrino in GeV scale. The branching fractions and the constraints for $|U_{\ell N}|^2$ are given, and hence may put new limits on this mass region. The ${\rm Higgs} \to W\mu\mu\pi$ channel is also considered to test massive neutrino within Higgs sector.