Neutral heavy lepton production at next high energy $e^+e^-$ linear colliders

Abstract

The discovery potential for detecting new heavy Majorana and Dirac neutrinos at some recently proposed high energy $e^+e^-$ colliders is discussed. These new particles are suggested by grand unified theories and superstring-inspired models. For these models the production of a single heavy neutrino is shown to be more relevant than pair production when comparing cross sections and neutrino mass ranges. The process $ e^+e^- \longrightarrow ν e^{\pm} W^{\mp}$ is calculated including on-shell and off-shell heavy neutrino effects. We present a detailed study of cross sections and distributions that shows a clear separation between the signal and standard model contributions, even after including hadronization effects.