Exploring hadronic de-excitation via Lepton Flavor Violation

TL;DR

This paper investigates hadronic de-excitation mechanisms involving lepton flavor violation, analyzing meson decay processes with effective operators to identify potential experimental signatures and constraints.

Contribution

It introduces a detailed analysis of LFV in meson decays using effective operators, highlighting the role of dilepton mass distributions in constraining new physics.

Findings

Branching ratios for quarkonia LFV are comparable to other hadronic systems.

Dilepton invariant mass distributions can help disentangle contributions from different operators.

Current bounds on effective couplings limit the parameter space for LFV processes.

Abstract

In this work, we consider a hadronic de-excitation mechanism via lepton flavor violation (LFV). Namely, for vector and pseudoscalar meson decays of the form $V^\prime \to V \mu e$ and $P^\prime \to P \mu e$, respectively. They are described considering effective dim-5 and dim-7 operators. Using the current bounds for the effective couplings obtained from direct processes, we exhibit the different features in the dilepton invariant mass distribution and the branching ratios, depending on the effective operator. We consider hadronic states, from light mesons to quarkonia. We show that the branching ratios of quarkonia system for LFV are comparable with the estimates in other hadronic systems. Our results show that the dilepton invariant mass may be useful to constrain individual contributions and help disentangle them, when complemented with observables from nuclei.