Probing the dipole portal to heavy neutral leptons via meson decays at the high-luminosity LHC

We consider the dipole portal to sterile neutrinos, also called heavy neutral leptons (HNLs). The dipole interaction with the photon leads to HNL production in meson decays as well as triggers the HNL decay into an active neutrino and a photon. HNLs with masses of the order of 0.01–1 GeV are naturally long lived if the dipole coupling is sufficiently small. We perform Monte Carlo simulations and derive the sensitivities of the proposed FASER2 and FACET long-lived particle experiments to HNLs produced via the dipole operator in meson decays at the high-luminosity LHC. Our findings show that these future detectors will be complementary to each other, as well as to existing experiments, and will be able to probe new parts of the parameter space, especially in the case of the dipole operator coupled to the tau neutrino.