Sensitivity prospects for lepton-trijet signals in the νSMEFT at the LHeC

• Published in: The European physical journal. C, Particles and fields Particles and fields, 2024-03, Vol.84 (3), p.326, Article 326
• Main Authors: Zapata, Gabriel, Urruzola, Tomás, Sampayo, Oscar A., Duarte, Lucía
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Subjects: Astronomy; Astrophysics and Cosmology; Couplings; Elementary Particles; Field theory; Flavor (particle physics); Hadrons; Heavy Ions; Leptons; Luminosity; Measurement Science and Instrumentation; Neutrinos; Nuclear Energy; Nuclear Physics; Physics; Physics and Astronomy; Quantum Field Theories; Quantum Field Theory; Regular Article - Theoretical Physics; Sensitivity; String Theory
• ISSN: 1434-6052; 1434-6044; 1434-6052
• DOI: 10.1140/epjc/s10052-024-12591-2

The observation of neutrino oscillations and masses motivates the extension of the standard model with right-handed neutrinos, leading to heavy neutrino states possibly in the electroweak scale, which could be impacted by new high-scale weakly coupled physics. A systematic tool for studying these interactions is the neutrino-extended standard model effective field theory ν SMEFT. In this work we study the prospects of the future LHeC electron-proton collider to discover or constrain the ν SMEFT interactions, performing the first dedicated and realistic analysis of the well known lepton-trijet signals, for both the lepton flavor violating p e - → μ - + 3 j (LFV) and the lepton number violating p e - → μ + + 3 j (LNV) channels, for HNLs masses in the electroweak scale range: 100 GeV ≤ m N ≤ 500 GeV . The obtained sensitivity prospects show that the LHeC with 100 fb - 1 luminosity could be able to probe the scenario of a heavy N and constrain the effective couplings to a region of the parameter space as tight as the bounds that are currently considered for the O ( 10 ) GeV scale masses, with effective couplings of O ( 10 - 1 ) for NP scale Λ = 1 TeV .