Erlangen 2026 – scientific programme

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T: Fachverband Teilchenphysik

T 99: Searches/BSM V

T 99.5: Talk

Friday, March 20, 2026, 10:00–10:15, KH 02.014

Simulation of Heavy Neutral Lepton production and decay with the Sherpa event generator. — •Antonia Bähr¹, Marzieh Bahmani², Michael Kobel¹, and Frank Siegert¹ — ¹IKTP, TU Dresden, Dresden, Germany — ²HU Berlin, Berlin, Germany

Although the Standard Model has been proven to be a successful theory for explaining the fundamentals of particle physics, some question still remain unanswered: Contrary to its initial assumption, neutrinos have been shown to possess mass. However, their masses are much lighter (m < 0.45 eV) than those of all other fundamental fermions (m ∼ 0.5 MeV …0.2 TeV).
There are numerous theories trying to explain these findings. In this talk, we focus on the type 1 see-saw mechanism, where heavy neutral leptons (HNLs) emerge as additional mostly right-handed mass eigenstates.
I will present the implementation of production and decay of HNLs, for masses of a few GeV at the LHC with Sherpa, a Monte Carlo event generator for the simulation of high-energy particle reactions. Besides validating the simulation results by comparing them to simulations done by Madgraph+Pythia, I will especially focus on the inclusion of semileptonic decay channels and the successful consideration of spin-correlation in the Sherpa simulations, which is not available for the other generators.

Keywords: Heavy Neutral Leptons; Sherpa event generator