Five-body leptonic decays of muon and tau leptons

TL;DR

This paper analyzes five-body leptonic decays of muon and tau within the Standard Model and effective field theory, computing branching ratios, distributions, and exploring implications for testing weak interactions and lepton flavor violation.

Contribution

It provides new calculations of decay distributions, compares conflicting previous results, and discusses the potential for detecting time reversal violation and lepton flavor violation in these decays.

Findings

Computed branching ratios for muon and tau decays.

Derived energy and angular distributions for polarized decays.

Identified backgrounds for lepton flavor violation searches.

Abstract

We study the five-body decays $\mu^- \to e^- e^+ e^- \nu_{\mu} \bar{\nu}_{e}$ and $\tau^- \to \ell^- \ell'^+\ell'^-\nu_{\tau}\bar{\nu}_{\ell}$ for $\ell, \ell'=e, \mu$ within the Standard Model (SM) and in a general effective field theory description of the weak interactions at low energies. We compute the branching ratios and compare our results with two previous, mutually discrepant, SM calculations. By assuming a general structure for the weak currents we derive the expressions for the energy and angular distributions of the three charged leptons when the decaying lepton is polarized, which will be useful in precise tests of the weak charged current at Belle II. In these decays, leptonic $\mathbf{T}$-odd correlations in triple products of spin and momenta --which may signal time reversal violation in the leptonic sector-- are suppressed by the tiny neutrino masses. Therefore, a measurement of such $\mathbf{T}$-violating observables would be associated to neutrinoless lepton flavor violating (LFV) decays, where this effect is not extremely suppressed. We also study the backgrounds that the SM five-lepton lepton decays constitute to searches of LFV $L^- \to \ell^- \ell'^+\ell'^-$ decays. Searches at high values of the invariant mass of the $\ell'^+\ell'^-$ pair look the most convenient way to overcome the background.