Review of Recent Searches for Rare and Forbidden Dilepton Decays of Charmed Mesons

TL;DR

This paper reviews recent experimental searches for rare and forbidden dilepton decays of charmed mesons, highlighting the improved limits set by Fermilab's E791 experiment on various decay modes involving muons and electrons.

Contribution

It provides a comprehensive summary of the latest experimental limits on rare D meson decays, emphasizing the most stringent constraints achieved to date.

Findings

E791 set new stringent limits on 22 rare and forbidden decay modes.

Most limits were more restrictive than previous searches or were reported for the first time.

The results advance the understanding of flavor-changing neutral currents and lepton violation in charm decays.

Abstract

I briefly review the results of recent searches for flavor-changing neutral current and lepton-flavor and lepton-number violating decays of D+, Ds, and D0 mesons (and their antiparticles) into modes containing muons and electrons. The primary focus is the results from Fermilab charm hadroproduction experiment E791. E791 examined 24 pi,l,l and K,l,l decay modes of D+ and Ds and l+l- decay modes of D0. Limits presented by E791 for 22 rare and forbidden dilepton decays of D mesons were more stringent than those obtained from previous searches, or else were the first reported.