Neutrino masses and lepton-number violation in the littlest Higgs scenario

Abstract

We investigate the sources of neutrino mass generation in little Higgs theories, by confining ourselves to the “littlest Higgs” scenario. Our conclusion is that the most satisfactory way of incorporating neutrino masses is to include a lepton-number violating interaction between the scalar triplet and lepton doublets. The tree-level neutrino masses generated by the vacuum expectation value of the triplet are found to dominate over contributions from dimension-five operators so long as no additional large lepton-number violating physics exists at the cutoff scale of the effective theory. We also calculate the various decay branching ratios of the charged and neutral scalar triplet states, in regions of the parameter space consistent with the observed neutrino masses, hoping to search for signals of lepton-number violating interactions in collider experiments.