Phenomenology of heavy vector-like leptons

TL;DR

This paper investigates how a heavy generation of vector-like leptons could influence the electron's electric dipole moment and rare muon decay processes, providing insights into physics beyond the Standard Model.

Contribution

It analyzes the effects of heavy vector-like leptons on lepton flavor violation and electric dipole moments, extending the understanding of potential new physics at high mass scales.

Findings

Vector-like leptons can significantly affect electron EDM and muon decay rates.

Experiments are sensitive to lepton masses up to about 100 TeV despite small Yukawa couplings.

Small Yukawa couplings do not preclude detectable effects in current or future experiments.

Abstract

We study the impact that a heavy generation of vector-like leptons can have on the value of the electric dipole moment of the electron, and the rates for the flavor violating processes mu --> e gamma and mu --> 3e. The smallness of the charged lepton masses suggests that at least some of the Yukawa coupling constants of the vector-like leptons to the ordinary leptons or amongst themselves are small, but even with such small couplings experiments trying to detect these quantities are sensitive to extra generation lepton masses up to about 100 TeV.