Probing lepton flavor violation in meson decays with LHC data

S. Descotes-Genon; D. A. Faroughy; I. Plakias; O. Sumensari

doi:10.1140/epjc/s10052-023-11860-w

2024 Impact factor 4.8

Particles and Fields

Open Access

Eur. Phys. J. C (2023) 83: 753
https://doi.org/10.1140/epjc/s10052-023-11860-w

Regular Article - Theoretical Physics

Probing lepton flavor violation in meson decays with LHC data

S. Descotes-Genon¹, D. A. Faroughy², I. Plakias¹ and O. Sumensari¹^d

¹ Université Paris-Saclay, CNRS/IN2P3, IJCLab, 91405, Orsay, France
² NHETC, Department of Physics and Astronomy, Rutgers University, 08854, Piscataway, NJ, USA

^d olcyr.sumensari@ijclab.in2p3.fr

Received: 29 March 2023
Accepted: 25 July 2023
Published online: 28 August 2023

Abstract

In this letter, we use LHC data from the Drell–Yan processes $p p \to ℓ_{i} ℓ_{j}$ $pp\rightarrow \ell _i\ell _j$ (with $i \neq j$ $i\ne j$ ) to derive model-independent upper limits on lepton-flavor-violating meson decays. Our analysis is based on an Effective Field Theory (EFT) approach and it does not require a specific assumption regarding the basis of effective operators. We find that current LHC data (140 ${fb}^{- 1}$ $\textrm{fb}^{-1}$ ) already provides competitive limits on $B (B \to π e τ)$ ${\mathcal {B}}(B\rightarrow \pi e \tau )$ and $B (B \to π μ τ)$ ${\mathcal {B}}(B\rightarrow \pi \mu \tau )$ with respect to the ones obtained through experimental searches at the B-factories. Moreover, we derive upper limits on several decays that have not been searched for experimentally yet, such as $D^{0} \to e τ$ $D^0\rightarrow e\tau$ in the charm sector, and various semileptonic decays such as $B \to ρ μ τ$ $B\rightarrow \rho \mu \tau$ , $B_{s} \to K μ τ$ $B_s\rightarrow K \mu \tau$ and $B_{s} \to ϕ μ τ$ $B_s\rightarrow \phi \mu \tau$ . Lastly, we discuss the validity of the EFT description of LHC data and the impact of loop corrections in our analysis.

© The Author(s) 2023

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