Scalar Leptoquarks in Leptonic Processes

TL;DR

This paper investigates scalar leptoquarks, their effects on leptonic processes, and their potential to explain flavor anomalies, including detailed calculations of related observables and lepton flavor violation.

Contribution

It provides a comprehensive analysis of all five scalar leptoquark representations, including their interactions, mixing, and phenomenological implications for leptonic and flavor-changing processes.

Findings

Scalar leptoquarks induce measurable effects in leptonic decays.

Correlations found between muon g-2 and Higgs/leptonic decay rates.

Leptoquark mixing affects electroweak lepton couplings.

Abstract

Leptoquarks are hypothetical new particles, which couple quarks directly to leptons. They experienced a renaissance in recent years as they are prime candidates to explain the so-called \textit{flavor anomalies}, i.e. the deviations between the Standard Model predictions and measurements in $b\to s\ell^{+}\ell^{-}$ and $b\to c\tau\nu$ processes and in the anomalous magnetic moment of the muon. At the one-loop level these particles unavoidably generate effects in the purely leptonic processes like $Z\to\ell^{+}\ell^{-}$, $Z\to\nu\bar\nu$, $W\to\ell\nu$ and $h\to\ell^{+}\ell^{-}$ and can even generate non-zero rates for lepton flavor violating processes such as $\ell\to \ell^{\prime}\gamma$, $Z\to\ell^+\ell^{\prime -}$, $h\to\ell^+\ell^{\prime -}$ and $\ell\to 3\ell^\prime$. In this article we calculate these processes for all five representations of scalar Leptoquarks. We include their most general interaction terms with the Standard Model Higgs boson, which leads to Leptoquark mixing after the former acquires a vacuum expectation value. In our phenomenological analysis we investigate the effects in modified lepton couplings to electroweak gauge bosons, we study the correlations of the anomalous magnetic moment of the muon with $h\to\mu^{+}\mu^{-}$ and $Z\to\mu^{+}\mu^{-}$ as well as the interplay between different lepton flavor violating decays.