Heavy Neutrinos and Where to Find Them

The discovery of neutrino oscillations led to a new understanding that neutrinos have mass, which requires physics beyond the Standard Model. One well-motivated and well-studied solution is that right handed neutrinos exist and interact in a way that generates light neutrino masses. Moreover, if these new neutrinos are “Heavy”, there is potential for explaining why the Standard Model neutrinos are so much lighter than the charged leptons and quarks. I will summarize current searches for these heavy neutrinos across a wide range of masses and then focus on a particular regime of interest — GeV-scale Heavy Neutrinos. I will demonstrate how neutrino oscillation experiments can serve as a great environment to find these hypothetical particles in the coming decade. If we are lucky enough to discover these particles, then understanding them will become of paramount importance to the particle physics community. I will show strategies for exploring two specific characteristics of these heavy neutrinos by studying their decays: whether or not Lepton number is conserved (or whether they are Dirac or Majorana fermions), and what types of particle/particles mediate their interactions.

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