Speaker
Description
The Standard Model has been proven to be valuable theory for explaining the funda-
mental principles of particle physics, however, some open questions still remain. Amongst
other things, these questions revolve around neutrinos, particularly why they are so much
lighter than other leptons. Furthermore, the Standard Model only contains left-handed
neutrinos, as right-handed ones, also known as sterile neutrinos, would not be affected
by any of the fundamental forces, apart from gravity.
There are several theories trying to explain these phenomenons, one of them is the see-saw
mechanism. There, right-handed neutrinos are introduced, resulting in the Lagrangian
density not only containing a Dirac but also a Majorana mass term. Because of this, there
are two neutrino mass eigenstates, a light and a heavy one. The light neutrino is expected
be the one that has already been observed in numerous experiments while the heavy one
would be a new kind of particle, a heavy neutral lepton.
Since the heavy neutral lepton would mostly be right-handed, it is not easily detectable.
However, there are searches going on, for instance at the LHC. To achieve this and under-
stand these processes better, we are simulating the production of heavy neutral leptons
in proton-proton collisions and their decay using Sherpa, a Monte Carlo event generator
for the simulation of high-energy reactions.
In this study, we will especially include the hadronic decays of the heavy neutral leptons
and the vertex offsets, as heavy neutral leptons are relatively long lived particles and
therefore do not decay immediately.
In this talk I will present the first results from these simulations in context of a typical
LHC setup
