New Physics in the Visible Final States of $B\to D^{(*)}\tau\nu$

TL;DR

This paper derives comprehensive helicity amplitudes for $B$ meson decays involving $ au$ leptons, incorporating all possible new physics operators and interference effects, enabling more precise experimental analyses and better discrimination of new physics scenarios.

Contribution

It provides the first complete amplitude-level expressions for $B o D^{(*)} au u$ decays including interference effects and all new physics operators, facilitating detailed differential studies.

Findings

Interference effects are significant and can be of order unity with new physics.

Amplitude-level results enable efficient reweighting of Monte Carlo simulations.

Including differential kinematic information improves sensitivity to new physics.

Abstract

We derive compact expressions for the helicity amplitudes of the many-body $B \to D^{(*)}(\to DY)\tau(\to X\nu)\nu$ decays, specifically for $X = \ell \nu$ or $\pi$ and $Y = \pi$ or $\gamma$. We include contributions from all ten possible new physics four-Fermi operators with arbitrary couplings. Our results capture interference effects in the full phase space of the visible $\tau$ and $D^*$ decay products which are missed in analyses that treat the $\tau$ or $D^*$ or both as stable. The $\tau$ interference effects are sizable, formally of order $m_\tau/m_B$ for the standard model, and may be of order unity in the presence of new physics. Treating interference correctly is essential when considering kinematic distributions of the $\tau$ or $D^*$ decay products, and when including experimentally unavoidable phase space cuts. Our amplitude-level results also allow for efficient exploration of new physics effects in the fully differential phase space, by enabling experiments to perform such studies on fully simulated Monte Carlo datasets via efficient event reweighing. As an example, we explore a class of new physics interactions that can fit the observed $R(D^{(*)})$ ratios, and show that analyses including more differential kinematic information can provide greater discriminating power for new physics, than single kinematic variables alone.