High Energy Physics Journal Club

Report on "LHC and the origin of neutrino mass"

by Diptimoy Ghosh

Friday, November 20, 2009 from to (Asia/Kolkata)
at Colaba Campus ( A-304 )
Description
LHC and the origin of neutrino mass
by Goran Senjanovic

It is often said that neutrino mass is a window to a new physics beyond the standard model (SM). This is certainly true if neutrinos are Majorana particles since the SM with Majorana neutrino mass is not a complete theory. The classical text-book test of neutrino Majorana mass, the neutrino-less double beta decay depends on the completion, and thus cannot probe neutrino mass. As pointed out already more than twenty five years ago, the colliders such as Tevatron or LHC offer a hope of probing directly the origin of neutrino Majorana mass through lepton number violating production of like sign lepton pairs. I discuss this in the context of all three types of seesaw mechanism. I then discuss in detail the situation in $L-R$ symmetric theories, which led originally to the seesaw and which incorporates naturally both type I and type II. A $W_R$ gauge boson with a mass in a few TeV region could easily dominate the neutrino-less double beta decay, and its discovery at LHC would have spectacular signatures of parity restoration and lepton number violation. At the end I give an example of a predictive SU(5) grand unified theory that results in a hybrid type I and III seesaw with a light fermion triplet below TeV scale. 
Organised by Sourendu Gupta