No Arabic abstract
If the observed light neutrino masses are induced by their Yukawa couplings to singlet right-handed neutrinos, natural smallness of those renders direct collider tests of the electroweak scale neutrino mass mechanisms almost impossible both in the case of Dirac and Majorana (seesaw of type I) neutrinos. However, in the triplet Higgs seesaw scenario the smallness of light neutrino masses may come from the smallness of B-L breaking parameters, allowing sizable Yukawa couplings even for a TeV scale triplet. We show that, in this scenario, measuring the branching fractions of doubly charged Higgs to different same-charged lepton flavours at LHC and/or ILC experiments will allow one to measure the neutrino mass parameters which neutrino oscillation experiments are insensitive to, including the neutrino mass hierarchy, lightest neutrino mass and Majorana phases.
We discuss the future prospects of heavy neutrino searches at next generation lepton colliders. In particular, we focus on the planned electron-positron colliders, operating in two different beam modes, namely, $e^+e^-$ and $e^-e^-$. In the $e^+e^-$ beam mode, we consider various production and decay modes of the heavy neutrino ($N$), and find that the final state with $e+2j+{E!!!/}_T$, arising from the $e^+e^-to N u$ production mode, is the most promising channel. However, since this mode is insensitive to the Majorana nature of the heavy neutrinos, we also study a new production channel $e^+e^-to Ne^pm W^mp$, which leads to a same-sign dilepton plus four jet final state, thus directly probing the lepton number violation in $e^+e^-$ colliders. In the $e^-e^-$ beam mode, we study the prospects of the lepton number violating process of $e^-e^-to W^-W^-$, mediated by a heavy Majorana neutrino. We use both cut-based and multivariate analysis techniques to make a realistic calculation of the relevant signal and background events, including detector effects for a generic linear collider detector. We find that with the cut-based analysis, the light-heavy neutrino mixing parameter $|V_{eN}|^2$ can be probed down to $sim 10^{-4}$ at 95% C.L. for the heavy neutrino mass up to $400$ GeV or so at $sqrt s=500$ GeV with $100 rm{fb}^{-1}$ of integrated luminosity. For smaller mixing values, we show that a multivariate analysis can improve the signal significance by up to an order of magnitude. These limits will be at least an order of magnitude better than the current best limits from electroweak precision data, as well as the projected limits from $sqrt s=14$ TeV LHC.
We propose an improved method for hadron-collider mass determination of new states that decay to a massive, long-lived state like the LSP in the MSSM. We focus on pair produced new states which undergo three-body decay to a pair of visible particles and the new invisible long-lived state. Our approach is to construct a kinematic quantity which enforces all known physical constraints on the system. The distribution of this quantity calculated for the observed events has an endpoint that determines the mass of the new states. However we find it much more efficient to determine the masses by fitting to the entire distribution and not just the end point. We consider the application of the method at the LHC for various models and demonstrate that the method can determine the masses within about 6 GeV using only 250 events. This implies the method is viable even for relatively rare processes at the LHC such as neutralino pair production.
The investigation of the endpoint region of the tritium beta decay spectrum is still the most sensitive direct method to determine the neutrino mass scale. In the nineties and the beginning of this century the tritium beta decay experiments at Mainz and Troitsk have reached a sensitivity on the neutrino mass of 2 eV/c^2 . They were using a new type of high-resolution spectrometer with large sensitivity, the MAC-E-Filter, and were studying the systematics in detail. Currently, the KATRIN experiment is being set up at Forschungszentrum Karlsruhe, Germany. KATRIN will improve the neutrino mass sensitivity by one order of magnitude down to 0.2 eV/c^2, sufficient to cover the degenerate neutrino mass scenarios and the cosmologically relevant neutrino mass range.
The impact of higher-order final-state photonic corrections on the precise determination of the W-boson mass at the Tevatron and LHC colliders is evaluated. The W-mass shift from a fit to the transverse mass distribution is found to be about 10 MeV in the W --> mu nu channel and a few MeV in the W --> e nu channel. The calculation, which is implemented in the Monte Carlo event generator HORACE for data analysis, can contribute to reduce the uncertainty associated to the W mass measurement at present and future hadron collider experiments.
A short overview about the potential of polarized beams at future colliders is given. In particular the baseline design for polarized beams at the ILC is presented and the physics case for polarized $e^-$ and $e^+$ is discussed. In order to fulfil the precision requirements spin tracking from the source to the interaction point is needed. Updates concerning the theoretical calculations as well as their implementation in simulation codes are reported.