About heavy neutrinos: Lepton-flavor violation in decays of charged leptons

Abstract

The fundamental description of nature, beyond the Standard Model (SM), may include heavy neutrinos that mix and thus allow processes in which lepton flavor is not preserved. We investigate the impact of charged currents that couple heavy gauge bosons to heavy neutrinos and SM leptons on lepton-flavor-violating decays of SM leptons into three charged leptons, with no final-state neutrinos. We implement our expressions for the leading contributions to $\mathrm{Br}(l_{\alpha }\to l_{\beta }{l}_{\sigma }{l}_{\sigma })$, which hold for either Dirac or Majorana neutrinos, to the trilepton decay $\mu \to 3e$, of the muon, and so determine sets of masses of heavy neutrinos and the heavy gauge boson, within GeVs to few TeVs, that are consistent with the upper bounds provided by the SINDRUM Collaboration. We find, however, that constraints dictated by the upper bound on $\mathrm{Br}(\mu \to e\gamma )$, from the MEG Collaboration, are more stringent. We utilize such parameters to find that the contributions to tau decays are $\sim 10^{-15}-10^{-13}$, well below bounds from $B$ factories. The mixing of heavy and SM charged bosons is also investigated. We find that current experimental data from MEG and SINDRUM would allow mixing angles as large as $\sim 10^{-2}$, for a relatively light new charged boson, but the expected sensitivity of the Mu3e experiment would be capable of setting an upper bound on this angle as small as $\sim 10^{-4}$ if the mass of this boson is within the range of few TeVs.

Comments: Accepted for publication in Journal of Physics G, 26 pages, 12 figures, 4 tables, several new elements were added for this version of the manuscript, the whole discussion was improved as well