Probing $\nu$SMEFT at Belle II with displaced dilepton vertices

Abstract

The existence of right-handed (RH) neutrinos is strongly motivated by the observation of small neutrino masses and as a means to shed light on the origin of parity violation in the Standard Model (SM). Experimental searches for the corresponding mass eigenstates, referred to as heavy neutral leptons (HNLs), have been carried out in a variety of experiments and within different HNL models. In the current work we use the SM effective field theory with added RH neutrinos, known as $\nu$SMEFT, to study GeV-scale HNL production in $e^+e^-$ collisions at the Belle~II experiment. We focus on leptonic decays of long-lived HNLs that produce a displaced vertex in the Belle~II detector. Accounting for detection efficiency and backgrounds, we estimate the sensitivity of Belle~II to the new-physics scale of four-fermion, Higgs-current, and dipole operators in $\nu$SMEFT. We find that for most operators, the search we propose probes large regions of parameter space that are not excluded by other searches.