Lepton flavor violation and dilepton tails at the LHC

Starting from a general effective Lagrangian for lepton flavor violation (LFV) in quark-lepton transitions, we derive constraints on the effective coefficients from the high-mass tails of the dilepton processes pp -> l(k)l(l) (with k not equal l). The current (projected) limits derived in this paper from LHC data with 36 fb(-1) (3 ab(-1)) can be applied to generic new physics scenarios, including the ones with scalar, vector and tensor effective operators. For purely left-handed operators, we explicitly compare these LHC constraints with the ones derived from flavor-physics observables, illustrating the complementarity of these different probes. While flavor physics is typically more constraining for quark-flavor violating operators, we find that LHC provides the most stringent limits on several flavor-conserving ones. Furthermore, we show that dilepton tails offer the best probes for charm-quark transitions at current luminosities and that they provide competitive limits for tauonic b -> d transitions at the high-luminosity LHC phase. As a by-product, we also provide general numerical expressions for several low-energy LFV processes, such as the semi-leptonic decays K -> pi l(k)(+/-)l(l)(-/+), B -> pi l(k)(+/-)l(l)(-/+) and B -> K(*)l(k)(+/-)l(l)(-/+).