If the existence of heavy neutrinos is proven, it could expand the standard model of particle physics and explain why the neutrinos we know have mass (the standard model cannot explain this). The oscillation of heavy neutrinos could also be essential in the matter-antimatter asymmetry of the universe.
By Jorge Román
Cover image: first detection of a neutrino. Credits: Argonne National Laboratory. Source: Flickr.com
A research team from the Saphir Millennium Institute, composed of Jilberto Zamora (associate researcher at Saphir and academic at Universidad Andrés Bello), Marcelo Vidal (Zamora's student at Universidad Andrés Bello) and Sebastián Tapia (researcher at Iowa State University), published a paper in the journal Physical Review D in which they give clues as to how heavy neutrino oscillations could be observed in experiments under development at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC), in particular the high-luminosity LHCb high-luminosity.
The existence of heavy neutrinos is a hypothesis that could explain why the neutrinos we currently know have mass (even if their mass is very, very small). If the hypothesis proves to be true, it would expand the standard model of particle physics. In addition, the oscillation of heavy neutrinos could be very important in the matter-antimatter asymmetry of the universe (another anomaly of the Standard Model). But this hypothetical particle is extremely difficult to detect.
Marcelo Vidal, Jilberto Zamora and Sebastián Tapia are the authors of this paper that determines how it would be possible detecting heavy neutrino oscillations in the future High-Luminosity LHCb.
However, the research by Zamora, Vidal and Tapia suggests that it might be possible to detect the heavy neutrino oscillation (and thus prove its existence) by observing the decay of certain B mesons at the LHCb experiment (one of the four large LHC experiments) when the High-Luminosity LHC is operational (which is projected to be in 2027). According to the authors, heavy neutrino oscillation could be observed if a thousand interaction events between heavy neutrinos and decaying B mesons are detected.c. And, if this new particle were to be discovered, it would undoubtedly be a huge breakthrough in the understanding of the subatomic world.
The research by Vidal, Zamora and Tapia was published in the journal Physical Review D and can be found in the journal Physical Review D. available here.
