Lepton Flavor and Number Conservation, and Physics Beyond the Standard Model
Lepton Flavor and Number Conservation, and Physics Beyond the Standard Model Andr´ede Gouv^ea1 and Petr Vogel2 1 Department of Physics and Astronomy, Northwestern University, Evanston, Illinois, 60208, USA 2 Kellogg Radiation Laboratory, Caltech, Pasadena, California, 91125, USA April 1, 2013 Abstract The physics responsible for neutrino masses and lepton mixing remains unknown. More ex- perimental data are needed to constrain and guide possible generalizations of the standard model of particle physics, and reveal the mechanism behind nonzero neutrino masses. Here, the physics associated with searches for the violation of lepton-flavor conservation in charged-lepton processes and the violation of lepton-number conservation in nuclear physics processes is summarized. In the first part, several aspects of charged-lepton flavor violation are discussed, especially its sensitivity to new particles and interactions beyond the standard model of particle physics. The discussion concentrates mostly on rare processes involving muons and electrons. In the second part, the sta- tus of the conservation of total lepton number is discussed. The discussion here concentrates on current and future probes of this apparent law of Nature via searches for neutrinoless double beta decay, which is also the most sensitive probe of the potential Majorana nature of neutrinos. arXiv:1303.4097v2 [hep-ph] 29 Mar 2013 1 1 Introduction In the absence of interactions that lead to nonzero neutrino masses, the Standard Model Lagrangian is invariant under global U(1)e × U(1)µ × U(1)τ rotations of the lepton fields. In other words, if neutrinos are massless, individual lepton-flavor numbers { electron-number, muon-number, and tau-number { are expected to be conserved.
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