Abstract
Solar neutrinos can be efficiently upscattered to MeV-scale heavy neutral leptons (HNLs) within the Earth’s mantle. HNLs can then decay to electron-positron pairs leading to energy deposition inside large volume detectors. In this paper, we consider mass-portal upscattering of solar neutrinos to HNLs of mass . The large volume of the Earth compensates for the long decay length of the HNLs leading to observable rates of in large volume detectors. We find that searches for mantle-upscattered HNLs can set novel limits on mixing with third-generation leptons, for masses in the MeV regime; sensitivity to mixing with first- and second-generation leptons is not competitive with existing search strategies.
- Received 19 October 2020
- Accepted 7 September 2021
DOI:https://doi.org/10.1103/PhysRevD.104.075028
Published by the American Physical Society under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International license. Further distribution of this work must maintain attribution to the author(s) and the published article’s title, journal citation, and DOI. Funded by SCOAP3.
Published by the American Physical Society