Long-lived neutral fermions at the DUNE near detector

Abstract

At the Deep Underground Neutrino Experiment (DUNE), a proton beam hits a fixed target leading to large production rates of mesons. These mesons can decay and potentially provide a source of long-lived neutral fermions. Examples of such long-lived fermions are heavy neutral leptons which can mix with the standard-model active neutrinos, and the bino-like lightest neutralino in R-parity-violating supersymmetry. We show that the Standard Model Effective Field Theory extended with right-handed singlet neutrinos can simultaneously describe heavy neutral leptons and bino-like neutralinos in a unified manner. We use the effective-field-theory framework to determine the sensitivity reach of the DUNE near detector in probing various scenarios of long-lived neutral fermions.