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  • Open Access

Heavy neutral lepton decay searches using solar neutrinos

Patrick Huber and Yulun Li

  • Center for Neutrino Physics, Department of Physics, Virginia Tech, Blacksburg, Virginia 24061, USA

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Phys. Rev. D 113, 015046 – Published 30 January, 2026

DOI: https://doi.org/10.1103/kvlq-yx1t

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 predictions 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.

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Phys. Rev. D 113, 015046– Published 30 January, 2026
  • Received 11 June 2025
  • Accepted 5 January 2026
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Published by the American Physical Society under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International license. Further distribution of this work must maintain attribution to the author(s) and the published article’s title, journal citation, and DOI. Funded by SCOAP3.

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