Indirect constraints on lepton-flavor-violating quarkonium decays

Within an effective-field-theory framework, we present a model-independent analysis of the potential of discovering new physics by searching for lepton flavor violation in heavy quarkonium decays and, more in general, we study the phenomenology of lepton-flavor-violating (LFV) 2 quark-2 lepton (2q2) operators with two charm or bottom fields. We compute the constraints from LFV muon and tau decays on the new-physics operators that can induce LFV processes involving cc¯ and bb¯ systems, thus providing a comprehensive list of indirect upper limits on processes such as J/ψ→′, (nS)→′, (nS)→′γ etc., which can be sought at BESIII, Belle II, and the proposed super tau-charm factory. We show that such indirect constraints are so stringent that they prevent the detection of quarkonium decays into eμ. In the case of decays of quarkonia into τ (e, μ), we find that an improvement by 2-3 orders of magnitude on the current sensitivities is in general required in order to discover or further constrain new physics. However, we show that cancellations among different contributions to the LFV tau decay rates are possible, such that ϒ(nS)→τ can saturate the present experimental bounds. We also find that, interestingly, searches for LFV Z decays, Z→τ, at future e+e- colliders are complementary probes of 2q2ℓ operators with third generation quarks ; X. M. acknowledges partial support from the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme under the Marie Skłodowska-Curie grant agreement No. 860881-HIDDeN and from the Spanish Research Agency (Agencia Estatal de Investigación) through the Grant IFT Centro de Excelencia Severo Ochoa No. CEX2020-001007-S and Grant No. PID2019-108892RB-I00 funded by MCIN/AEI