Perspectives to find heavy neutrinos with NA62

Abstract

The sensitivity of beam dump experiments to heavy neutrinos depends on the relative size of their mixings with the lepton flavours in the Standard Model. We study the impact of present neutrino oscillation data on these mixing angles in the minimal type I seesaw model. We find that current data significantly constrains the allowed heavy neutrino flavour mixing patterns. Based on this, we discuss the implications for the sensitivity of the NA62 experiment to heavy neutrinos when operated in the beam dump mode. We find that NA62 is currently the most sensitive experiment in the world for heavy neutrino masses between that of the kaon and the $D$-mesons. The sensitivity can vary by almost two orders of magnitude if the heavy neutrinos exclusively couple to the tau flavour, but depends only comparably weakly on the flavour mixing pattern within the parameter range preferred by light neutrino oscillation data.