Searching new physics in rare $B$-meson decays into multiple muons
Mikael Chala, Ulrik Egede, Michael Spannowsky

TL;DR
This paper proposes new rare B-meson decay channels involving multiple muons as probes for new heavy vector bosons and light scalars predicted by beyond Standard Model theories, and assesses LHCb's sensitivity to these processes.
Contribution
It identifies novel B-meson decay channels involving multiple muons as sensitive probes for new physics and evaluates the experimental reach of LHCb for detecting these rare decays.
Findings
LHCb can test branching ratios as low as 9×10^{-12} for certain decay modes.
New decay channels can probe interactions related to B anomalies and muon g-2.
Potential to discover or constrain new heavy vector bosons and light scalars.
Abstract
New heavy vector bosons and light scalars are predicted in a plethora of models of new physics. In particular, in new strongly interacting sectors they play the role of the and mesons in QCD. We show that some of their interactions, for example those required for the explanation of the anomalies and the of the muon, can be only probed in meson decays. We highlight new golden channels not yet studied experimentally, including and . Relying on generator level simulations for data taking with the LHCb detector, we determine the reach of this facility to the aforementioned processes. We show that branching ratios as small as () and can be tested at the CL respectively.
| Decay | LHCb | Upgrade I | Upgrade II |
|---|---|---|---|
| 60 | 9 | 1.4 | |
| 15 | 2.3 | 0.4 | |
| 37 | 5 | 0.9 | |
| 100 | 16 | 2.7 | |
| 1300 | 200 | 32 |
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aainstitutetext: Institute for Particle Physics Phenomenology, Department of Physics, Durham University, Durham, DH1 3LE, UKbbinstitutetext: Imperial College London, London, United Kingdombbinstitutetext: School of Physics and Astronomy, Monash University, Melbourne, Australia
Searching new physics in rare -meson decays into multiple muons
Mikael Chala b,c
Ulrik Egede a
and Michael Spannowsky
Abstract
New heavy vector bosons and light scalars are predicted in a plethora of models of new physics. In particular, in new strongly interacting sectors they play the role of the and mesons in QCD. We show that some of their interactions, for example those required for the explanation of the anomalies and the of the muon, can be only probed in meson decays. We highlight new golden channels not yet studied experimentally, including and . Relying on generator level simulations for data taking with the LHCb detector, we determine the reach of this facility to the aforementioned processes. We show that branching ratios as small as () and can be tested at the CL respectively.
††preprint: IPPP/19/12
1 Introduction
New heavy vector bosons and light scalars are common predictions of different scenarios of physics beyond the Standard Model (SM). The former appear in extensions of the SM gauge group, including theories of grand unification Georgi:1974sy ; Georgi:1974yf ; Pati:1974yy ; GellMann:1976pg ; Langacker:1980js and string constructions Hewett:1988xc . They are also natural in composite sectors Weinberg:1975gm ; Susskind:1978ms ; Farhi:1980xs ; Kaplan:1983sm and their holographic relatives ArkaniHamed:2000ds ; Rattazzi:2000hs . Recently, new vectors at the TeV scale have been also proposed as a plausible explanation DAmico:2017mtc of the anomalies observed in the branching fractions, angular distributions and lepton universality tests of the decays Aaij:2013qta ; Aaij:2014ora ; Aaij:2014pli ; Aaij:2015esa ; Aaij:2015oid ; Aaij:2017vbb ; Wehle:2016yoi ; Khachatryan:2015isa ; Sirunyan:2017dhj . Models prediciting ultralight scalars have been studied Bauer:2017ris for collider phenomenology. Likewise, they have been also studied in light of the observed disagreement between the predicted and the observed values of the anomalous magnetic moment of the muon Bauer:2017nlg ; Liu:2018xkx .
Perhaps, the most traditional scenario involving both new scalars and vectors consists of a new strongly interacting sector extending the SM. In this case, and play the role of the and mesons in QCD. The separation of these scales is explained by the pseudo-Nambu Goldstone boson nature of the latter. We show that rare decays can be naturally expected in this context. In the situation where the scalar decays to two muons, these include , which have already been searched for at LHCb Aaij:2016kfs , as well as with .
In this article, we perform simulations to estimate the reach of the LHCb experiment to the aforementioned processes with the currently available data as well as with the anticipated upgrades. Our choice of parameters is motivated by the and anomalies. However, our results are of much broader applicability. The paper is organized as follows. In Section 2 we introduce the generic Lagrangian we are interested in; we comment on constraints on the different parameters and compute the amplitudes for the different decays. In Section 2.1, we match a particular composite Higgs model to the Lagrangian above. We study the new rare meson decays in Section 3. We subsequently interpret these results in the model introduced before. Finally, we conclude in Section 4.
2 Generic Lagrangian
Let us extend the SM with a new vector boson and a new scalar with masses of the order of TeV and GeV, respectively. They are both singlets of the SM gauge group. At energies below the electroweak scale GeV, the Lagrangian we are interested in is
[TABLE]
where stand for the -th family of left-handed up and down quarks, and stand for the -th family of left- and right-handed leptons, respectively. Inspired by recently observed flavour anomalies, we will focus mostly on the case in which the only non-vanishing coupling is . To a lesser extent, we will also consider . These couplings are constrained by measurements of and Foldenauer:2016rpi , respectively. Thus, for TeV, and is bounded to be about one order of magnitude smaller.
Together with a non-vanishing , these couplings trigger rare decays as shown in Fig. 1.
The decay width for is
[TABLE]
with GeV Cheung:2006tm . Similar expressions hold for other decay modes, e.g. .
The amplitude for reads:
[TABLE]
with Ball:2004ye
[TABLE]
The transferred momentum is , and varies between and . The contraction of this matrix element with in the amplitude annihilates the part. Altogether, we obtain
[TABLE]
with
[TABLE]
In the approximation , , one easily obtains
[TABLE]
Following Ref. Ball:2004ye , we parametrize the form factor as , with and GeV2; see Fig. 2.
Similar expressions hold for other processes, e.g. or . The latter is however hard to test at the LHCb and we will not consider it. The reason is that the production cross section is much smaller and the width is larger (which reduces both the impact of the new interactions and the experimental efficiency).
We note also that final states containing one meson and can probe effective operators containing four quarks and two light scalars (12 of these operators are present in the SM effective field theory extended with Gripaios:2016xuo .) One can easily estimate , which is of the order of provided TeV. For this reason, we will also consider the channel . It tests operators such as
We will assume that decays into muons with a width smaller than MeV and a lifetime shorter than fs. In this case, it will appear not to have any experimentally measurable flight distance and will appear to have zero width. This is easily achieved if is muonphilic with . The processes discussed so far leads therefore to four-muon final states with and without additional mesons and with the muons forming pairs of two identical masses.
2.1 Explicit model
Light scalars are natural within CHMs, for they are approximate Nambu-Goldstone Bosons (NGBs) arising from the spontaneous symmetry breaking in the confinement of a new strong sector at a scale TeV. The simplest coset delivering the four Higgs degrees of freedom as well as a new scalar singlet is Gripaios:2009pe . Interestingly, it can be UV completed in four dimensions Ferretti:2016upr .
In this model, the SM fermions do not couple directly to the Higgs boson. They rather mix with other composite resonances that do interact with the Higgs boson. Thus, the Yukawa Lagrangian depends on the quantum numbers of the aforementioned resonances. As a simple yet realistic example, we assume that the second generation leptons mix with two fundamental representations of . An equivalent description is the embedding of the elementary leptons into incomplete fundamental representations of . The most general such embedding depends on a single positive parameter to give
[TABLE]
Using the corresponding Goldstone matrix
[TABLE]
one obtains the leading-order Yukawa Lagrangian
[TABLE]
The coupling stands for the muon Yukawa. The subindex in indicates the projection of the fundamental representation of into the singlet of according to the decomposition . The ellipsis stands for terms containing higher powers of . Likewise, the one-loop induced potential for reads:
[TABLE]
where we have neglected terms not involving . stands for L; analogously for with the flavour index. is a free parameter encoding the details of the strong sectors. Its size can be estimated using naive power counting Giudice:2007fh , , with the typical coupling between resonances. All in all, we obtain
[TABLE]
The scalar decays into muons. The other fermions respect this phenomenology provided they do not break the shift symmetry , nor . These two conditions can hold simultaneously if the left (right) chiralities mix with e.g. (), () or ().
The scalar defined above can explain the longstanding anomaly on the magnetic moment of the muon Liu:2018xkx . In this concrete model, we can fit the experimental measurement Bennett:2006fi within two standard deviations for and GeV and . Fitting the experimental observation within one standard deviation is in principle possible, but it requires even larger values of , too small values of (which would contradict the strongly coupled nature of the composite sector) and GeV (which is in tension with Higgs and electroweak precision data Ghosh:2015wiz ). Therefore, the value GeV is a very likely value in this setup.
New composite vector bosons explaining the observed anomalies in appear also naturally in this framework Niehoff:2015bfa ; Niehoff:2015iaa ; Carmona:2015ena ; Megias:2016bde ; GarciaGarcia:2016nvr ; Megias:2017ove ; Sannino:2017utc ; Carmona:2017fsn ; Chala:2018igk ; Falkowski:2018dsl . These particles decay preferably into composite states Chala:2018igk , being too broad and too heavy to be directly detected unless very dedicated LHC analyses are performed for masses TeV Chala:2018igk . 111Irrespectively of , the interaction between and the heavy resonances triggers the decay , where ∗ denotes off-shellness. For couplings equal to the unit, the corresponding width at tree level reads exactly , with the mass of . Even for GeV and TeV, the corresponding branching ratio is and therefore beyond the reach of our analysis.
The interaction with the SM fermions takes the form of Eq. 2, with DiLuzio:2017fdq ; Chala:2018igk . Relying on these results, we consider for reference the benchmark point
[TABLE]
For , this point satisfies all current constraints from LHC searches and measurements of . Constraints set by the latter observable could be competitive if the more recent predictions of the SM value are confirmed Bazavov:2016nty ; DiLuzio:2017fdq . However, we will show that a signal should be observable with the future upgrades of the LHCb experiment. In particular, we obtain , . Note that the final state with meson is of the same order of magnitude as the four body final state. Together with the fact that the meson has a higher production cross section than in collisions, this suggests that is a key signature to explore for this kind of models. This channel has not been experimentally explored though. Similar conclusions were pointed out in Ref. Nelson:2013ula in the context of dark sectors222In this case, rare meson decays are triggered by flavour-violating scalars..
3 Reach of the LHCb
LHCb has searched for the decays Aaij:2016kfs and has set the limits and with a 3 fb*-1* dataset at the collision energies of and TeV. However, there is a limitation in this analysis as it places a veto on the mass of the muon pairs to be close to the or mass, to avoid background from the decay followed by both vector mesons decaying to a pair of muons. As the mass is likely very close to the mass, the current analysis is not sufficiently general. If a new analysis removes the veto around the mass, and instead imposes a requirement that two opposite muon combinations recombine to the same invariant mass, the limit should stay the same and the background from would still be avoided.
Due to the four muons in the final state for the LHCb analysis, the combinatorial background to a possible signal is extremely low. As an essentially background free analysis, even in the far future, the branching fraction limit can be expected to scale inversely with the number of mesons produced.
In the run periods of Upgrade-I and Upgrade-II of LHCb, the collision energy will be TeV. As the cross-section is scaling more or less in direct proportion to the collision energy, the amount of mesons produced per inverse fb, can be expected to be around a factor higher compared to the average Run-1 conditions of the LHC. Expectations below will be quoted for the end of LHCb (9 fb*-1*), end of Upgrade-I (50 fb*-1*) and end of upgrade-II (300 fb*-1*). The naive scaling factors, compared to the current Run-1 for these, and taking the different cross-sections into account, are for LHCb a factor 4.4, for Upgrade-I a factor 29, and for Upgrade-II a factor 180. Thus for the limits on we should expect , and , respectively. This assumes no changes to the trigger or tracking performance in the upgrades of LHCb.
Irreducible backgrounds to the decay have to be considered. The decay with is one of these. Using the measured branching fractions Aaij:2015cxj ; Ambrosino:2004vg we get . As can be seen from the expected limits above, even at the end of LHCb Upgrade II, this is not relevant. For the equivalent decay mode of the , the measured branching fraction limit for the decay is three orders of magnitude below the mode and thus even less of a concern. The decay has a measured differential rate of GeV*-2* in the region of the squared dimuon mass close to the mass Aaij:2015esa . Letting the decay to a muon pair and considering a mass region with width of around 20 MeV, corresponding to a realistic mass resolution, this will give a background at the level and is thus not relevant.
A simplified model for which limits the LHCb experiment can be made for similar decay modes. When comparing different hadrons, the relative production fractions as measured at TeV collisions in the LHCb acceptance Aaij:2011jp are taken into account. The relative production fractions are not expected to change significantly with collision energy as they are determined from the fragmentation process. From this, we conclude that the production of and are the same and that the production of mesons is a factor 3.7 less common. For the reconstruction in LHCb, it is assumed that the efficiency is 95 % per track inside the fiducial volume defined by the pseudorapidity and that tracks have a transverse momentum above GeV with respect to the beam axis to be reconstructed. For the trigger it is assumed that at least one reconstructed muon should have a transverse momentum above GeV. The effect of these criteria is that final states with a larger number of particles have a lower efficiency, both due to the requirement that all tracks have to be reconstructed but also due to that the muons turn softer and the trigger efficiency thus is getting lower; see Fig. 3.
For the positive identification of muons, it is assumed that the efficiency is 100 % for muons with a total momentum above 2.5 GeV. It is assumed that no or only very loose particle identification is required on the charged hadrons. For the reconstruction, it is assumed that only the final state is used. This is the easiest decay mode to reconstruct and has a branching fraction of PDG2018 . The final state with a semileptonic decay of the could also be considered, in an analysis similar to the Aaij:2018pka analysis carried out by LHCb. However, to estimate the reconstruction efficiency of this five charged lepton final state with a neutrino would require a full detector level simulation which is beyond this paper. For the case, we consider the decay into , which has a branching ratio of .
All overall efficiencies for a given final state are evaluated relative to the published analysis on the decays Aaij:2016kfs . As the trigger and main selection are the same for all these decays, this provides a robust normalisation method.
Simulations are carried out using Pythia 8 Sjostrand:2007gs for the production of mesons in collisions and EvtGen Lange:2001uf for the subsequent decays. The decays are assumed to be of the type with and with a possible meson in the final state. The meson decay is simulated with a flat phase space distribution. If the hadron is unstable, it is decayed to stable particles using the default model in EvtGen and with branching fractions taken from the PDG PDG2018 . A summary of the expected limits that can be set are given in Table 1.
Translated to the plane for given values of , the limits from and are compared with those from in Fig. 4. Interestingly, we see that scales of several tens of TeV not yet probed by current experiments could be tested in the Upgrade II of the LHCb with our analysis.
4 Conclusions
We have considered scenarios involving new heavy and flavour-violating vectors as well as light scalars . We have shown that these particles give rise to rare meson decays that are not yet probed. As the preferred mass of the scalar lies inside the window vetoed by current LHCb searches, namely MeV, even the simplest decay mode is not fully probed. Other decay modes of interest are and . We have shown that the five-body final state can be as significant as the four-body. Relying on simulations, we have estimated the reach of the LHCb experiment for these processes in the current run and in Upgrades I and II. In the Upgrade II scenario we expect that branching fraction limits in the region can be reached.
Finally, we emphasize again that the decays into a meson and are the only sensible probe of different effective operators in the SM effective-field theory extended with a scalar singlet. We therefore encourage the experimental collaborations to consider these processes in future analyses.
Acknowledgments. We would like to thank Martin Bauer and Jakub Scholtz for helpful discussions. MC is supported by the Royal Society under the Newton International Fellowship programme. MS was supported by the Humboldt Society during the finalisation of parts of this work.
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