Charged lepton flavor violation associated with heavy quark production in deep inelastic lepton-nucleon scattering via scalar exchange

We study charged lepton flavor violation (CLFV) associated with heavy quark pair production in lepton-nucleon deep-inelastic scattering l(i)N -> l(j)q (q) over barX. Here l(i) and l(i )denote the initial and final leptons; N and X are respectively the initial nucleon and arbitrary final hadronic system. We employ a model Lagrangian in which a scalar and pseudoscalar mediator generates the CLFV. We derive heavy quark structure functions for scalar and pseudoscalar currents and compute momentum distributions of the final lepton for the process. Our focus is on the heavy quark mass effects in the final lepton momentum distribution. We clarify the necessity of inclusion of the heavy quark mass to obtain reliable theory predictions for the CLFV signal searches in the deep-inelastic scattering.

Automated summary

In this study, we focus on the charged lepton flavor violation associated with heavy quark pair production in lepton-nucleon deep-inelastic scattering. We employ a model Lagrangian to generate the charged lepton flavor violation and compute the momentum distribution of the final lepton. We find that considering the heavy quark mass effects in the final lepton momentum distribution is necessary.