Mu-Tau Production at Hadron Colliders

TL;DR

This paper explores the potential for hadron colliders to detect mu-tau flavor violation via dimension-6 operators, providing sensitivity estimates for current and future collider experiments.

Contribution

It introduces a novel analysis of mu-tau production through effective operators at hadron colliders, estimating the sensitivity reach for new physics scales.

Findings

Tevatron can surpass current bounds for many operators.

LHC can probe new physics scales up to 6-21 TeV.

Potential for significant sensitivity improvements with limited data.

Abstract

Motivated by large nu_mu-nu_tau flavor mixing, we consider mu-tau production at hadron colliders via dimension-6 effective operators, which can be attributed to new physics in the flavor sector at a higher scale Lambda. Current bounds on many of these operators from low energy experiments are very weak or nonexistent, and they may lead to clean mu+tau- and mu-tau+ signals at hadron colliders. At the Tevatron with 8 inverse femtobarns, one can exceed current bounds for most operators, with most 2 sigma sensitivities being in the 6-24 TeV range. We find that at the LHC with 1 (100) inverse femtobarns integrated luminosity, one can reach a 2 sigma sensitivity for Lambda \sim 3-10 TeV (Lambda =\sim 6-21 TeV), depending on the Lorentz structure of the operator. For some operators, an improvement of several orders of magnitude in sensitivity can be obtained with only a few tens of inverse picobarns at the LHC.