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Improved BBN constraints on Heavy Neutral Leptons

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arxiv 2008.00749 v2 pith:3XYI2NZP submitted 2020-08-03 hep-ph astro-ph.CO

classification hep-phastro-ph.CO
keywords hnlsprimordialboundheavyleptonslifetimemassesneutral
verification ladder T0 review T1 audit T2 compute T3 formal
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abstract

We constrain the lifetime of thermally produced Heavy Neutral Leptons (HNLs) from primordial nucleosynthesis. We show that even a small fraction of mesons present in the primordial plasma leads to the over-production of the primordial helium. This puts an upper bound on the lifetime of HNLs $\tau_{N}<0.02$ s for masses $m_{N}>m_{\pi}$ (as compared to 0.1 s reported previously). In combination with accelerator searches, this allows us to put a new lower bound on the HNLs masses and defining the "bottom line" for HNL searches at the future Intensity Frontier experiments.

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Forward citations

Cited by 9 Pith papers

Reviewed papers in the Pith corpus that reference this work. Sorted by Pith novelty score. Full citation record

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