Flavor Violating Transitions of Charged Leptons from a Seesaw Mechanism of Dimension Seven

Abstract

A mechanism has been suggested recently to generate the neutrino mass out of a dimension-seven operator. This is expected to relieve the tension between the occurrence of a tiny neutrino mass and the observability of other physics effects beyond it. Such a mechanism would inevitably entail lepton flavor violating effects. We study in this work the radiative and purely leptonic transitions of the light charged leptons. In so doing we make a systematic analysis of the flavor structure by providing a convenient parametrization of the mass matrices in terms of independent physical parameters and diagonalizing them explicitly. We illustrate our numerical results by sampling over two CP phases and one Yukawa coupling which are the essential parameters in addition to the heavy lepton mass. We find that with the stringent constraints coming from the muon decays and the muon-electron conversion in nuclei taken into account the decays of the tau lepton are severely suppressed in the majority of parameter space. There exist, however, small regions in which some tau decays can reach a level that is about 2 orders of magnitude below their current bounds.

v1: 25 pages, 8 figures; v2: proofread version for PRD. Included muon-electron conversion in nuclei at the referee's suggestion and added relevant refs accordingly; main conclusion not changed but bounds on tau lepton decays becoming more stringent; linguistic and editing corrections also made

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• Cascade Seesaw for Tiny Neutrino Mass
• Looking for hints of a reconstructible seesaw model at the Large Hadron Collider
• Radiative neutrino masses: A window to new physics