Heavy neutral leptons at the Electron-Ion Collider

The future Electron-Ion Collider (EIC) at Brookhaven National Laboratory, along with its primary capacity to elucidate the nuclear structure, will offer new opportunities to probe physics beyond the Standard Model coupled to the electroweak sector. Among the best motivated examples of such new physics are new heavy neutral leptons (HNLs), which are likely to play a key role in neutrino mass generation and lepton number violation. We study the capability of the EIC to search for HNLs, which can be produced in electron- proton collisions through charged current interactions as a consequence of their mixing with light neutrinos. We find that, with the EIC design energy and integrated luminosity, one is able to probe HNLs in the mass range of 1 - 100 GeV with mixing angles down to the order of 10(-4) - 10(-3) through the prompt decay signatures, and in the mass range of 1 - 10 GeV with vertical bar U-e vertical bar(2) similar to 10(-6) - 10(-4) via the displaced decay signatures. We also consider the invisible mode where an HNL is undetected or decaying to dark sector particles. One could potentially probe heavy HNLs for mixing angles in the window 10(-3) - 10(-2), provided SM background systematics can be brought under control. These searches are complementary to other probes of HNLs, such as neutrino-less double-beta decay, meson decay, fixed-target, and high-energy collider experiments.