Search for Rare and Forbidden Decays of D mesons to Final States with Electrons

TL;DR

This paper reports a search for rare and forbidden D+ meson decays involving dielectrons, setting upper limits on their occurrence rates due to no observed signals.

Contribution

First search for flavor changing neutral current and lepton number violating D+ decays to dielectron final states using CLEO-c data.

Findings

No signals observed for the targeted decay modes.

90% confidence level upper limits set at a few times 10^-6.

Provides constraints on new physics models involving these decays.

Abstract

Using the CLEO-c detector and a data sample of 0.8 million D+D- pairs at the Psi(3770) a search has been performed for flavor changing neutral current and lepton number violating decays of D+ mesons to final states with dielectrons. No signals are observed and 90% confidence limits are set for specific decay modes in the range of a few times ten to the minus six.