Charged lepton flavor violation associated with heavy quark production in deep inelastic lepton-nucleon scattering via scalar exchange

TL;DR

This paper investigates charged lepton flavor violation in deep-inelastic scattering involving heavy quark production, emphasizing the importance of heavy quark mass effects for accurate theoretical predictions in CLFV searches.

Contribution

It introduces a detailed calculation of heavy quark structure functions for scalar and pseudoscalar currents, highlighting the significance of heavy quark mass effects in CLFV processes.

Findings

Heavy quark mass effects are crucial for reliable CLFV predictions.

Derived heavy quark structure functions for scalar and pseudoscalar mediators.

Momentum distributions of the final lepton are significantly affected by heavy quark masses.

Abstract

We study charged lepton flavor violation (CLFV) associated with heavy quark pair production in lepton-nucleon deep-inelastic scattering $\ell_i N \to \ell_j q\bar{q} X$. Here $\ell_i$ and $\ell_j$ denote the initial and final leptons; $N$ and $X$ are respectively the initial nucleon and arbitrary final hadronic system. We employ a model Lagrangian in which a scalar and pseudoscalar mediator generates the CLFV. We derive heavy quark structure functions for scalar and pseudoscalar currents and compute momentum distributions of the final lepton for the process. Our focus is on the heavy quark mass effects in the final lepton momentum distribution. We clarify the necessity of inclusion of the heavy quark mass to obtain reliable theory predictions for the CLFV signal searches in the deep-inelastic scattering.