General neutrino interactions with sterile neutrinos in light of coherent neutrino-nucleus scattering and meson invisible decays

Abstract

In this work we study the current bounds from the CEνNS process and meson invisible decays on generic neutrino interactions with sterile neutrinos in effective field theories. The interactions between quarks and left-handed SM neutrinos and/or right-handed neutrinos are first described by the low-energy effective field theory (LNEFT) between the electroweak scale and the chiral symmetry breaking scale. We complete the independent operator basis for the LNEFT up to dimension-6 by including both the lepton-number-conserving (LNC) and lepton-number-violating (LNV) operators involving right-handed neutrinos. We translate the bounds on the LNEFT Wilson coefficients from the COHERENT observation and calculate the branching fractions of light meson invisible decays. The bounds on LNEFT are then mapped onto the SM effective field theory with sterile neutrinos (SMNEFT) to constrain new physics above the electroweak scale. We find that the meson invisible decays can provide the only sensitive probe for τ neutrino flavor component and s quark component in the quark-neutrino interactions involving two (one) active neutrinos and for the effective operators without any active neutrino fields. The CEνNS process places the most stringent bound on all other Wilson coefficients. By assuming one dominant Wilson coefficient at a time in SMNEFT and negligible sterile neutrino mass, the most stringent limits on the new physics scale are 2.7–10 TeV from corresponding dipole operator in LNEFT and 0.5–1.5 TeV from neutrino-quark operator in LNEFT.