Heavy Neutral Leptons at Muon Colliders

The future high-energy muon colliders, featuring both high energy and low background, could play a critical role in our searches for new physics. The smallness of neutrino mass is a puzzle of particle physics. Broad classes of solutions to the neutrino puzzles can be best tested by seeking the partners of SM light neutrinos, dubbed as heavy neutral leptons (HNLs), at muon colliders. We can parametrize HNLs in terms of the mass $m_N$ and the mixing angle with $\ell$-flavor $U_\ell$. In this work, we focus on the regime $m_N > O(100)$ GeV and study the projected sensitivities on the $|U_\ell|^2 - m_N$ plane with the full-reconstructable HNL decay into a hadronic $W$ and a charged lepton. The projected reach in $|U_\ell|^2$ leads to the best sensitivities in the TeV realm.Comment: 33 pages, 10 figure

Heavy Neutral Leptons from Stopped Muons and Pions

Stopped muons, which are generic in pion-at-rest experiments, can shed light on heavy neutral leptons (HNLs) in unexplored parameter spaces. If the HNL is lighter than the muon, the HNL can be produced from decays of muons and pions.The HNL will travel from the production location and decay into visible Standard Model (SM) modes, leaving signals inside downstream detectors. We find that in the case that the HNL dominantly mixes with muon neutrinos, the LSND constraint on the mixing angle squared is stronger than all the previous constraints by more than an order of magnitude. In this study, we recast the LSND measurement of the $\nu-e$ scattering. Future experiments such as PIP2-BD could further improve the sensitivity, provided they can distinguish the HNL events from backgrounds induced by the SM neutrinos.Comment: 13 pages, 2 figure

Flavor-changing light bosons with accidental longevity

We consider a model with a complex scalar field that couples to $(e,\mu)$ or $(\mu,\tau)$ within the "longevity" window: $[|m_{l_1} - m_{l_2}|, m_{l_1} + m_{l_2}]$ in which $l_1$ and $l_2$ are the two different charged leptons. Within such a mass window, even a relatively large coupling (e.g. of the size commensurate with the current accuracy/discrepancy in the muon $g-2$ experiment) leads to long lifetimes and macroscopic propagation distance between production and decay points. We propose to exploit several existing neutrino experiments and one future experiment to probe the parameter space of this model. For the $\mu-e$ sector, we exploit the muonium decay branching ratio and the production and decay sequence at the LSND experiment, excluding the parametric region suggested by $g_\mu -2$ anomaly. For the $\tau-\mu$ sector, we analyze three main production mechanisms of scalars at beam dump experiments: the Drell-Yan process, the heavy meson decay, and the muon scattering. We explore the constraints from the past CHARM and NuTeV experiments, and evaluate sensitivity for the proposed beam dump experiment, SHiP. The latter can thoroughly probe the parameter space relevant for the $g_\mu - 2$ anomaly.Comment: 30 pages, 9 figures and comments welcom

Top Yukawa Coupling Determination at High Energy Muon Collider

The Top Yukawa coupling profoundly influences several core mysteries linked to the electroweak scale and the Higgs boson. We study the feasibility of measuring the Top Yukawa coupling at high-energy muon colliders by examining the high-energy dynamics of the weak boson fusion to top quark pair processes. A deviation of the Top Yukawa coupling from the Standard Model would lead modified $V V \rightarrow t\bar{t}$ process, violating unitarity at high energy. Our analysis reveals that utilizing a muon collider with a center-of-mass energy of 10 TeV and an integrated luminosity of 10 ab$^{-1}$ allows us to investigate the Top Yukawa coupling with a precision surpassing 1.5\%, more than one order of magnitude better than the precision from $t\bar t h$ channel at muon colliders. This precision represents a notable enhancement compared to the anticipated sensitivities of the High-Luminosity LHC (3.4\%) and those at muon colliders derived from the $t\bar{t} H$ process.Comment: 33 pages, 13 figure

Detection of early-universe gravitational-wave signatures and fundamental physics

Detection of a gravitational-wave signal of non-astrophysical origin would be a landmark discovery, potentially providing a significant clue to some of our most basic, big-picture scientific questions about the Universe. In this white paper, we survey the leading early-Universe mechanisms that may produce a detectable signal—including inflation, phase transitions, topological defects, as well as primordial black holes—and highlight the connections to fundamental physics. We review the complementarity with collider searches for new physics, and multimessenger probes of the large-scale structure of the Universe.Peer reviewe

Detection of early-universe gravitational-wave signatures and fundamental physics

Detection of a gravitational-wave signal of non-astrophysical origin would be a landmark discovery, potentially providing a significant clue to some of our most basic, big-picture scientific questions about the Universe. In this white paper, we survey the leading early-Universe mechanisms that may produce a detectable signal—including inflation, phase transitions, topological defects, as well as primordial black holes—and highlight the connections to fundamental physics. We review the complementarity with collider searches for new physics, and multimessenger probes of the large-scale structure of the Universe.Peer reviewe

Searching for VHE gamma-ray emission associated with IceCube neutrino alerts using FACT, H.E.S.S., MAGIC, and VERITAS

The realtime follow-up of neutrino events is a promising approach to search for astrophysical neutrino sources. It has so far provided compelling evidence for a neutrino point source: the flaring gamma-ray blazar TXS 0506+056 was observed in coincidence with the high-energy neutrino IceCube-170922A detected by IceCube. The detection of very-high-energy gamma rays (VHE, E > 100 GeV) from this source helped establish the coincidence and constrained the modeling of the blazar emission at the time of the IceCube event. The four major imaging atmospheric Cherenkov telescope arrays (IACTs) - FACT, H.E.S.S., MAGIC, and VERITAS - operate an active follow-up program of target-of-opportunity observations of neutrino alerts sent by IceCube. This program has two main components. One are the observations of known gamma-ray sources around which a cluster of candidate neutrino events has been identified by IceCube (Gamma-ray Follow-Up, GFU). The second one is the follow-up of single high-energy neutrino candidate events of potential astrophysical origin such as IceCube-170922A. GFU has been recently upgraded by IceCube in collaboration with the IACT groups. We present here recent results from the IACT follow-up programs of IceCube neutrino alerts and a description of the upgraded IceCube GFU system