Probing lepton flavour violation via neutrinoless $\tau\longrightarrow 3\mu$ decays with the ATLAS detector

TL;DR

This paper investigates the ATLAS detector's ability to detect lepton-flavour-violating tau decays into three muons using 8 TeV collision data, setting new upper limits on the decay's branching fraction.

Contribution

It introduces a novel method for probing $ au o 3 ext{mu}$ decays via $W o au u$ production and applies it to ATLAS data to establish upper limits.

Findings

No $ au o 3 ext{mu}$ events observed

Upper limit on branching fraction: $3.76 imes 10^{-7}$

Method demonstrates sensitivity with existing data

Abstract

This article presents the sensitivity of the ATLAS experiment to the lepton-flavour-violating decays of $\tau\to 3\mu$. A method utilising the production of $\tau$ leptons via $W\to\tau\nu$ decays is used. This method is applied to the sample of 20.3 fb$^{-1}$ of $pp$ collision data at a centre-of-mass energy of 8 TeV collected by the ATLAS experiment at the LHC in 2012. No event is observed passing the selection criteria, and the observed (expected) upper limit on the $\tau$ lepton branching fraction into three muons, ${\rm Br}(\tau\to 3\mu)$, is $3.76\times 10^{-7}$ ($3.94\times 10^{-7}$) at 90% confidence level.