Search for heavy neutrinos in $K^+ \rightarrow \mu^+ \nu_{\mu}$ decays

Cristina Lazzeroni , Nicolas Lurkin , Francis Newson , Angela Romano , Augusto Ceccucci , Hans Danielsson , Valeri Falaleev , Lau Gatignon , Silvia Goy Lopez , Bjorn Hallgren , Andrew Maier , Andreas Joachim Peters , Mauro Piccini , Petra Riedler , Pierluigi Frabetti , Evelina Mihova Gersabeck , Vladimir Kekelidze , Dmitry Madigozhin , Milena Misheva , Natalia Molokanova , Sergei Movchan , Yuri Potrebenikov , Sergey Shkarovskiy , Alexander Zinchenko , Philip David Rubin , Wander Baldini , Angelo Cotta Ramusino , Pietro Dalpiaz , Massimiliano Fiorini , Alberto Gianoli , Alan Norton , Ferruccio Petrucci , Mauro Savrié , Heinrich Wahl , Andrea Bizzeti , Francesca Bucci , Michele Veltri , Enrico Iacopini , Massimo Lenti , Antonella Antonelli , Matthew Moulson , Mauro Raggi , Tommaso Spadaro , Kirsten Eppard , Manuel Hita-Hochgesand , Konrad Kleinknecht , Burkhard Renk , Rainer Wanke , Andreas Winhart , Roland Winston , Vladimir Bolotov , Viacheslav Duk , Evgeny Gushchin , Fabio Ambrosino , Domenico Di Filippo , Paolo Massarotti , Marco Napolitano , Vito Palladino , Giulio Saracino , Giuseppina Anzivino , Ermanno Imbergamo , Roberto Piandani , Antonino Sergi , Patrizia Cenci , Monica Pepe , Flavio Costantini , Niels Doble , Sergio Giudici , Giuseppe Pierazzini , Marco Sozzi , Stefano Venditti , Spasimir Balev , Gianmaria Collazuol , Luigi Di Lella , Stefano Gallorini , Evgueni Goudzovski , Gianluca Lamanna , Italo Mannelli , Giuseppe Ruggiero , Claudio Cerri , Riccardo Fantechi , Sergey Kholodenko , Viktor Kurshetsov , Vladimir Obraztsov , Vitali Semenov , Oleg Yushchenko , Giulio d'Agostini , Emanuele Leonardi , Marco Serra , Paolo Valente , Adolfo Fucci , Andrea Salamon , Brigitte Bloch-Devaux (1) , Bernard Peyaud (1) , Jürgen Engelfried , David Coward , Venelin Kozhuharov , Leandar Litov , Roberta Arcidiacono , Simone Bifani , Cristina Biino , Giulio Dellacasa , Flavio Marchetto , Toshio Numao , Fabrice Retière

1 IRFU - Institut de Recherches sur les lois Fondamentales de l'Univers

The NA62 experiment recorded a large sample of K+→μ+νμ decays in 2007. A peak search has been performed in the reconstructed missing mass spectrum. In the absence of a signal, limits in the range 2×10−6 to 10−5 have been set on the squared mixing matrix element |Uμ4|2 between muon and heavy neutrino states, for heavy neutrino masses in the range 300–375 MeV/ c2 . The result extends the range of masses for which upper limits have been set on the value of |Uμ4|2 in previous production search experiments.

Mots clés: Kaon decays; Heavy neutrinos; K+: leptonic decay; K+: rare decay; new physics; neutrino: heavy: search for; neutrino: mass; mass spectrum; missing-mass; neutrino: mixing; mass: upper limit; muon+: energy spectrum; NA62; experimental results; K+ --> muon+ neutrino/mu; S077A01

Domaines: Physique des Hautes Energies - Expérience [hep-ex]

Cristina Lazzeroni, Nicolas Lurkin, Francis Newson, Angela Romano, Augusto Ceccucci, et al.. Search for heavy neutrinos in $K^+ \rightarrow \mu^+ \nu_{\mu}$ decays. Phys.Lett.B, 2017, 772, pp.712-718. ⟨10.1016/j.physletb.2017.07.055⟩. ⟨hal-01645540⟩