Probing ALP Lepton Flavour Violation at $\mu$TRISTAN

TL;DR

This paper explores the potential of the proposed $ ext{TRISTAN}$ collider to detect axion-like particles with lepton flavor violating interactions, offering a new avenue for probing beyond Standard Model physics in the charged lepton sector.

Contribution

It provides a model-independent analysis of $ ext{TRISTAN}$'s sensitivity to LFV ALP couplings across various production channels and compares this with existing low-energy constraints.

Findings

$ ext{TRISTAN}$ can probe ALP masses from 1 to 100 GeV.

Sensitivity is complementary to low-energy LFV searches.

In the light ALP regime, parameter space is already constrained by existing experiments.

Abstract

Axion-like particles (ALPs) with lepton flavour violating (LFV) interactions are predicted within a wide range of flavoured ALP models. The proposed $\mu$TRISTAN high-energy $e^-\mu^+$ and $\mu^+\mu^+$ collider will provide a good opportunity to explore flavour physics in the charged lepton sector. In this work, based on a model-independent effective Lagrangian describing the ALP leptonic interactions, we investigate the potential of $\mu$TRISTAN to probe ALP LFV couplings. We analyse the testability of selected ALP production channels with potential sensitivity at $\mu$TRISTAN, considering different beams and collision energies, including $e^- \mu^+ \to a \gamma$, $e^- \mu^+ \to e^- \tau^+ a$, $\mu^+ \mu^+ \to \mu^+ \tau^+ a$, and $e^- \mu^+ \to \tau^- \mu^+ a$. The produced ALP $a$ is either long-lived or can promptly decay to flavour violating or conserving charged lepton final states. In particular, combining the above LFV ALP production modes with a suitable LFV decay mode, one can identify signatures that are virtually free of Standard Model background. We show the resulting sensitivity of $\mu$TRISTAN to LFV ALP couplings and compare it with multiple low-energy leptonic constraints and the future improvements thereof. We find that $\mu$TRISTAN can be generally complementary to searches for low-energy LFV processes and measurements of the leptonic magnetic dipole moments and has the capability to explore unconstrained parameter space for ALP masses in the $\mathcal{O}(1)$ to $\mathcal{O}(100)$~GeV range. In the light ALP regime, however, the parameter space that $\mu$TRISTAN is sensitive to, has been already excluded by low-energy searches for LFV decays.