18–23 Aug 2025
University of California at Santa Cruz
US/Pacific timezone

Targets for Flavor-Violating Top Decay

19 Aug 2025, 14:40
20m
Social Sciences 2: 075 (UC Santa Cruz)

Social Sciences 2: 075

UC Santa Cruz

Flavor physics and neutrinos Flavor physics and neutrinos

Speaker

Christopher Donohue (University of California, Santa Cruz)

Description

Analyticity and unitarity constrain broad classes of new physics models by linking flavor-conserving and flavor-violating four-fermion interactions. In this work, we explore how these theoretical relations impact flavor-violating rare top quark decays. Building on our previous results, we present an updated analysis of the decays $t \to q \ell^+ \ell^-$ and identify interesting target branching ratios in the range of $10^{-7}$ to $10^{-6}$ once current experimental constraints from flavor-conserving processes are taken into account. We extend the analysis to top decays with lepton flavor violation, deriving correlations among the relevant Wilson coefficients and confronting them with existing limits from LEP and the LHC. Notably, we find that current searches for $t \to q e \mu$ are already probing theoretically motivated regions of parameter space. These results strongly support continued efforts to explore flavor-violating top decays as a powerful probe of new physics.

Authors

Christopher Donohue (University of California, Santa Cruz) Siddharth Vignesh Mukundhan (UC Santa Cruz) Wolfgang Altmannshofer (UC Santa Cruz) Zev Balme (University of California - Santa Cruz) stefania gori (UC Santa Cruz)

Presentation materials