Non-unitarity of the leptonic mixing matrix: present bounds and future sensitivities

The non-unitarity of the effective leptonic mixing matrix at low energies is a generic signal of extensions of the Standard Model (SM) with extra fermionic singlet particles, i.e. “sterile” or “right-handed” neutrinos, to account for the observed neutrino masses. The low energy effects of such extensions can be described in a model-independent way by the Minimal Unitarity Violation (MUV) scheme, an effective field theory extension of the SM. We perform a global fit of the MUV scheme parameters to the present experimental data, which yields the up-to-date constraints on leptonic non-unitarity. Furthermore, we investigate the sensitivities and discovery prospects of future experiments. In particular, FCC-ee/TLEP would be a powerful probe of flavour-conserving non-unitarity for singlet masses up to ∼ 60TeV. Regarding flavour-violating non-unitarity, future experiments on muon-to-electron conversion in nuclei could even probe extensions with singlet masses up to ∼ 0.3PeV.