Neutrino puzzle via the LH portal

Since the SM predicts massless neutrinos, neutrino masses are, as of today, the only totally convincing laboratory evidence for the existence of physics beyond the SM. Unraveling the origin and mass generation mechanism for the neutrinos calls for a broad and rich experimental program, to which Belgium has remarkable contributions, such as JUNO, SoLid and the LHC itself.

The most straightforward mechanism to generate neutrino masses is the so-called seesaw mechanism, predicated on the existence of “sterile” neutrinos. The determination of the number and masses of such additional sterile neutrinos could provide an answer to several other important questions (e.g. the matter-antimatter asymmetry of the universe, the existence of a few-keV sterile neutrino as dark matter,…).

In this WP we propose to search for sterile neutrinos across several complementary experiments and to perform coordinated theoretical interpretations of the corresponding results/perspectives.

Team: G. Bruno (UCL), B. Clerbaux (ULB), D. Dobur (UG), T. Hambye (ULB), F. Maltoni (UCL), M. Tytgat (ULB), N. Van Remortel (UA), PhD9, PhD10, PD5, PD7, PD12-PD16.

Synergies

The project brings together the expertise in neutrino physics and leptogenesis from ULBTH, and the recent experimental efforts in the neutrino sector in Belgium (in addition to LHC, UA, UG, and VUB are key members of SoLid and ULB joined recently the JUNO project). The search for sterile neutrinos in different mass ranges is proposed using three complementary experimental efforts. Further complementarity is present in the LHC context, with the displaced jet/lepton tagging of WP6, and shared challenges with analyses in WP4.