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arXiv · 2605.11630

Long-lived sterile neutrinos from axionlike particles at the Super Tau-Charm Facility

Xiaokun Li·Zeren Simon Wang·Yu Zhang·Xiaorong Zhou
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Abstract

We study the search prospect of long-lived heavy neutral leptons (HNLs) pair produced in decays of axionlike particles (ALPs) at the proposed Super Tau--Charm Facility (STCF), focusing on the center-of-mass energy of $\sqrt{s}=3.773$ GeV. The ALPs are assumed to originate from $D^\pm$-meson decays in association with a charged pion. We perform both truth-level and detector-level Monte Carlo simulations and obtain the expected sensitivity reach to the mixing parameter between the HNL and the electron neutrino, $|V_{eN}|^2$, with a displaced-vertex search at STCF. We find that STCF can probe values of $|V_{eN}|^2$ about one-to-two orders of magnitude beyond the existing bounds. We also perform an approximate reinterpretation of a search for HNLs at the CHARM experiment, which is subject to model-dependent assumptions on the production and kinematic distributions, and find that beam-dump experiments may provide strong complementary constraints.

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Xiaokun Li, Zeren Simon Wang, Yu Zhang, Xiaorong Zhou. 2026-05-12. Long-lived sterile neutrinos from axionlike particles at the Super Tau-Charm Facility. https://arxiv.org/abs/2605.11630

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