Four lepton flavor violating signals at the LHC

TL;DR

This paper explores the potential for detecting lepton flavor violation through charged quadrilepton signals at the LHC, analyzing operator contributions and sensitivity to new physics scales.

Contribution

It introduces a classification of six-fermionic operators leading to flavor violating quadrileptons and evaluates their production cross sections at 14 TeV LHC energies.

Findings

Quadrilepton signals can be more advantageous than dileptons for detecting lepton flavor violation.

Cross sections for various operators are computed at 14 TeV.

Sensitivity to new physics scale $\\Lambda$ is established based on integrated luminosity.

Abstract

Some yet unknown dynamics is expected to be at work behind the flavor puzzles of the Standard Model. Speculations exist that this may manifest itself in significant strength at the terascale. One consequence may be lepton flavor violation with total lepton number conserved. Already observed in neutrino oscillation experiments, such a phenomenon may show up more prominently at TeV energies, thus signaling a completely new physics. Proposed flavor violating charged dilepton states have already been studied with reference to the LHC. Here we study the production and detection at the LHC of flavor violating charged quadrileptons which are shown to have certain advantages over dileptons in searching for lepton flavor violation. A classification of all six-fermionic operators, in the chiral basis and contributing to such processes, is made and the corresponding cross section for each in 14 TeV pp collisions is computed under the hypothesis of single operator dominance. We further present the sensitivity reach of the new physics scale $\Lambda$ in terms of the integrated luminosity.