Prospects of searches for excited neutrinos at the LHC

The Baur, Spira, and Zerwas model of composite quarks and leptons predicts the excited neutrinos to be produced in proton-proton collisions via contact interactions. Subsequently, the excited neutrinos decay via gauge interaction or contact interaction. The final states always include missing transverse energy; there can also be zero to three charged leptons and/or jets. The present study scans the possible final state scenarios, depending on the model parameter values, to identify a search that can be reinterpreted as a search for excited tau neutrinos, focusing on excited tau neutrinos for demonstration purposes. The ATLAS monojet search appears to be a suitable candidate for such reinterpretation. The publicly available results of the ATLAS monojet search are used to derive rough limits on the excited tau neutrino mass and the contact interaction scale. The reinterpretation of the search can considerably improve the current 1.6 TeV mass limit and reach the 4 TeV region.