Studies of Lepton Flavor Violation at the LHC

TL;DR

This paper investigates the potential to detect lepton flavor violation at the LHC via gluon fusion processes, providing constraints on new physics scales through analysis of dimension 8 and 6 operators with 100 fb$^{-1}$ of data.

Contribution

It demonstrates the LHC's capability to probe lepton flavor violation mediated by high-dimensional operators, establishing new bounds on the new physics scale.

Findings

Constraints on NP scale $ ightarrow$ $oxed{ ext{3-4 TeV}}$ with 100 fb$^{-1}$

Gluon luminosity enhances sensitivity despite dimension 8 suppression

Top quark loops can induce relevant operators for LFV

Abstract

We examine the charged lepton flavor violating process $gg \rightarrow \mu^\pm \tau^\mp$ at the $\sqrt{s} = 13$ TeV LHC. Operators generating this process can be induced by new physics (NP) at dimension 8. Despite the power suppression associated with dimension 8 operators, we show that the LHC's large gluon luminosity makes it possible to probe this channel. For an integrated luminosity of 100 fb$^{-1}$ at the LHC, we predict a constraint on the NP scale $\Lambda \gtrsim 3$ TeV. In addition, we point out that such operators can be induced through top quark loops in models that generate dimension 6 operators of the form $\overline{t} t \, \mu \tau$. We find that the NP scale of these dimension 6 operators can be constrained to be $\Lambda \gtrsim 3.4-4.1$ TeV with 100 fb$^{-1}$ of data.