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Search for Heavy Neutrinos and
Neutrino Mixing
Beside the searches for primary neutrino masses a big variety of experiments
has been performed looking for neutrino mixing. Inevitable consequences
of non-degenerate neutrino masses and mixing are neutrino oscillations,
deviations in the spectra of weak decays, and neutrino decays. For neutrino
masses below ca. 1 MeV beta-decay experiments searching for kinks in the
energy spectra of the emitted electron are sensitive down to ca. .
For neutrino masses above ca. 1 MeV up to 10 MeV the high neutrino flux
from nuclear reactors were used to search for the neutrino decay .
Most sensitive limits reached are .
At higher masses the two-body kinematics in the decay or
, or is used where the heavy neutrino
would cause an abnormal peak in the charged lepton spectrum. In accelerator
experiments again neutrino decay was investigated. Here neutrinos originate
from light
and K or the heavier D and Ds mesons produced
in proton beam dumps. The LEP experiments investigating the shape of the
Z-resonance and searching for neutrino decay exclude a fourth family Dirac
neutrino up to a mass of 44 GeV for all mixing elements. A fourth family
Majorana neutrino is excluded up to a mass of 38.2 GeV. In theories beyond
the standard model isosinglet neutrinos are discussed which don't couple
to the Z like ordinary neutrinos and hence are not yet excluded. Two searches
for heavy isosinglet neutrinos have been performed, testing the hypothesis
of mixing between isosinglet and isodoublet neutrinos. One experiment,
CHARM-II, was looking for neutral current production of and its subsequent
decay. Another search was done by the LEP experiments where is produced
in Z boson decays. No evidence for heavy isosinglet neutrinos was found.
Neutrinos which are too heavy to be directly produced at present accelerators
still would affect physics at lower energies due to deviation from neutrino
universality. The measured neutrino couplings for
,
,
and
in neutral as well as charged current reactions constrain the sum of non-diagonal
elements of neutrino mixing, i.e. and .
Next: Conclusion
and Prospect Up: Neutrino
Masses Previous: Mass
limits for
NuPECC WebForce,
2007-09-09