Same-Sign Taus Signatures of Maximally Flavor-Violating Scalars at the LHC

TL;DR

This paper investigates the potential of the LHC to detect maximally flavor-violating scalars through same-sign tau signatures, focusing on couplings that explain the muon g-2 anomaly and evade current constraints.

Contribution

It introduces a novel analysis of same-sign tau signatures from flavor-violating scalars, highlighting their discovery potential at the LHC in specific mass and coupling ranges.

Findings

Couplings down to 10^{-2} TeV^{-1} can be probed at 14 TeV HL-LHC.

Couplings down to 0.1 TeV^{-1} can be excluded at 13 TeV LHC.

Same-sign tau signatures provide a clean and promising discovery channel.

Abstract

We explore single and double flavor-violating scalar (flavon) production at the 13 and 14 TeV LHC in an effective field theory formulation where flavons always change the flavor of the Standard Model fermions. When those scalars couple to mass, their flavor-changing couplings to top quarks and tau leptons are favored. Focusing on the mass region below the top-quark mass, we find couplings that fit the muon $(g-2)$ discrepancy and avoid several current experimental constraints. We determine the potential of the LHC to exclude or discover such a new physics scenario with clean signatures consisting of same-sign tau leptons and the simultaneous observation of resonances in the tau plus electron or muon invariant mass. We found that in the double production mode, effective couplings down to order $10^{-2}$ TeV$^{-1}$ can be probed for flavon masses in the 10--170 GeV range at the 14 TeV HL-LHC, but couplings down to 0.1 TeV$^{-1}$ can already be excluded at 95\% confidence level with data collected from the 13 TeV LHC in the same mass interval. We also explore the impact of sizeable diagonal flavon couplings on the prospects of LHC for the signals we propose.