Leptonic scalars at the LHC

Abstract

We explore the collider prospects of neutrino non-standard interaction with a Standard Model (SM) gauge-singlet leptonic scalar ϕ carrying two units of lepton-number-charge. These leptonic scalars are forbidden from interacting with the SM fermions at the renormalizable level and, if one allows for higher-dimensional operators, couple predominantly to SM neutrinos. For masses at or below the electroweak scale, ϕ decays exclusively into neutrinos. Its characteristic production signature at hadron collider experiments like the LHC would be via the vector boson fusion process and leads to same-sign dileptons, two forward jets in opposite hemispheres, and missing transverse energy, i.e., $$ pp\to {\mathrm{\ell}}_{\alpha}^{\pm }{\mathrm{\ell}}_{\beta}^{\pm } jj+{E}_T^{\mathrm{miss}}\left(\alpha, \beta =e,\mu, \tau \right) $$ pp → ℓ α ± ℓ β ± jj + E T miss α β = e μ τ . Exploiting the final states of electrons and muons, we estimate, for the first time, the sensitivity of the LHC to these lepton-number-charged scalars. We show that the LHC sensitivity is largely complementary to that of low-energy precision measurements of the decays of charged leptons, charged mesons, W , Z and the SM Higgs boson, as well as the neutrino beam experiments like MINOS, and searches for neutrino self-interactions at IceCube and in cosmological observations. For ϕ mass larger than roughly 10 GeV, our projected LHC sensitivity would surpass all existing bounds.