Search for Heavy Right-Handed Majorana Neutrinos in the Decay of Top Quarks Produced in Proton-Proton Collisions at √<i>s</I>=13 Tev With the Atlas Detector

Abstract

A search for heavy right-handed Majorana neutrinos is performed with the ATLAS detector at the CERN Large Hadron Collider, using the 140 fb(-1) of proton-proton collision data at root s = 13 TeV collected during Run 2. This search targets t (t) over bar production, in which both top quarks decay into a bottom quark and a W boson, where one of the W bosons decays hadronically and the other decays into an electron or muon and a heavy neutral lepton. The heavy neutral lepton is identified through a decay into an electron or muon and another W boson, resulting in a pair of same-charge same-flavor leptons in the final state. This paper presents the first search for heavy neutral leptons in the mass range of 15-75 GeV using t (t) over bar events. No significant excess is observed over the background expectation, and upper limits are placed on the signal cross sections. Assuming a benchmark scenario of the phenomenological type-I seesaw model, these cross section limits are then translated into upper limits on the mixing parameters of the heavy Majorana neutrino with Standard Model neutrinos.