Heavy Neutral Lepton Decay Searches using Solar Neutrinos

Abstract

We study the sensitivity to the decay of a heavy neutral lepton into $e^+e^-$-pairs using the solar boron-8 neutrino flux as source. We provide a fully differential cross section for this process including the interference of neutral and charged current amplitudes. We revisit a previous bound from Borexino and make predicitions for the expected sensitivity in future large liquid noble gas detectors, like XLZD, Argo and DUNE, as well as high-resolution scintillator detectors based on the LiquidO technology. We find that more than two orders of magnitude improvement in mixing angle reach is possible relative to existing bounds.