Revealing Neutrino Mass Ordering at CEPC and FCC-ee

Abstract

The neutrino masses ordering remains one of the most important open questions in neutrino physics. While upcoming oscillation experiments aim to resolve this problem at low energies, complementary approaches are highly desirable. In this Letter, we show that the neutrino mass ordering can be probed at high-energy colliders through the lepton-flavor structure of heavy neutral lepton (HNL) interactions. In the minimal Type-I seesaw scenario with two nearly degenerate HNLs, the heavy--light neutrino mixings are strongly correlated with the light-neutrino mass spectrum, leading to distinct flavor patterns for the normal and inverted hierarchies. We demonstrate that future $Z$ factories, such as CEPC and FCC-ee, can probe the neutrino mass ordering for total HNL mixings as small as $U_{\rm tot}^2 \gtrsim 4 \times 10^{-9}$, and discriminate between the two hierarchies for $U_{\rm tot}^2 \gtrsim 10^{-6}$. Our results establish collider searches for HNLs as a powerful and complementary probe of the neutrino mass ordering.