About heavy neutrinos: Lepton-flavor violation in decays of charged leptons

TL;DR

This paper explores how heavy neutrinos and new charged gauge bosons could cause lepton-flavor-violating decays, analyzing experimental bounds to constrain their properties and potential signals in future experiments.

Contribution

It provides a detailed calculation of lepton-flavor-violating decay rates involving heavy neutrinos and gauge bosons, considering both Dirac and Majorana cases, and assesses experimental constraints.

Findings

Constraints from muon decay experiments limit heavy neutrino parameters.

Tau decay contributions are negligible compared to current bounds.

Future experiments could significantly tighten bounds on heavy gauge boson mixing angles.

Abstract

The fundamental description of nature, beyond the Standard Model (SM), may include heavy neutrinos that mix and thus allow processes in which lepton flavor is not preserved. We investigate the impact of charged currents that couple heavy gauge bosons to heavy neutrinos and SM leptons on lepton-flavor-violating decays of SM leptons into three charged leptons, with no final-state neutrinos. We implement our expressions for the leading contributions to ${\rm Br}(l_\alpha\to l_\beta\,l_\sigma\,l_\sigma)$, which hold for either Dirac or Majorana neutrinos, to the trilepton decay $\mu\to3e$, of the muon, and so determine sets of masses of heavy neutrinos and the heavy gauge boson, within GeVs to few TeVs, that are consistent with the upper bounds provided by the SINDRUM Collaboration. We find, however, that constraints dictated by the upper bound on ${\rm Br}(\mu\to e\gamma)$, from the MEG Collaboration, are more stringent. We utilize such parameters to find that the contributions to tau decays are $\sim10^{-15}-10^{-13}$, well below bounds from $B$ factories. The mixing of heavy and SM charged bosons is also investigated. We find that current experimental data from MEG and SINDRUM would allow mixing angles as large as $\sim10^{-2}$, for a relatively light new charged boson, but the expected sensitivity of the Mu3e experiment would be capable of setting an upper bound on this angle as small as $\sim10^{-4}$ if the mass of this boson is within the range of few TeVs.