English

Novel and Updated Bounds on Flavor-violating Z Interactions in the Lepton Sector

High Energy Physics - Phenomenology 2026-03-27 v2

Abstract

We investigate the experimental bounds on the Flavor-Violating (FV) couplings of the ZZ boson to the charged leptons. In addition to the direct LHC searches for FV ZZ decays to leptons, we investigate indirect bounds from flavor-conserving ZZ decays to leptons at 1-loop, bounds from LEP searches, Electroweak Precision Observables (EWPO), ijγ\ell_{i}\to\ell_{j}\gamma decays, i3j\ell_{i}\to3\ell_{j} decays, ij+inv.\ell_{i}\to\ell_{j}+\text{inv.} decays, FV meson decays to leptons, FV τ\tau decays to μ(e)\mu(e) + mesons, muon conversion in nuclei, and from muonium-antimuonium oscillations. For FV ZZ couplings to τμ\tau\mu, we find that τμγ\tau\to\mu\gamma yields the strongest bounds, with a level reaching O(105)\mathcal{O}(10^{-5}), followed by bounds from τ3μ(μee)\tau\to3\mu(\mu ee). For FV ZZ couplings to τe\tau e, we find that the strongest bounds arise from the decay τμμe\tau\to\mu\mu e, reaching O(107)\mathcal{O}(10^{-7}) as well, with bounds from τ3e\tau\to3e also yielding strong bounds. For FV ZZ couplings to μe\mu e, we find that the strongest bounds are obtained from the decay μ3e\mu\to3e, reaching O(1011)\mathcal{O}(10^{-11}), with bounds from μeγ\mu\to e\gamma, muon conversion, KL0μeK_{L}^{0}\rightarrow\mu e and μe+inv.\mu\to e+\text{inv.} also providing strong bounds. We also study projections from future experiments, such as the FCC-ee, Belle II and the Mu2e experiment. For the ZZ couplings to τμ\tau\mu, we find that future experiments could improve the bound to O(106)\mathcal{O}(10^{-6}), whereas for the ZZ couplings to τe\tau e, we find that future experiments could improve the bound to O(108)\mathcal{O}(10^{-8}), and for the ZZ couplings to μe\mu e, they could improve the bound to O(1013)\mathcal{O}(10^{-13})

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2503.07236,
  title  = {Novel and Updated Bounds on Flavor-violating Z Interactions in the Lepton Sector},
  author = {Fayez Abu-Ajamieh and Amine Ahriche and Nobuchika Okada},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2503.07236},
  year   = {2026}
}

Comments

33 Pages, 10 figures