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Axionlike-particle contributions to the μ e conversion

Journal Article · · Physical Review. D.

We study the μ e conversion process in nuclear targets arising in models of axionlike particles (ALPs) with hadronic and charged lepton flavor violating (CLFV) interactions. Contributions to this process generally fall into two categories: spin-independent (SI) and spin-dependent (SD). While the SI contribution can be generated by a dipole operator through purely leptonic ALP interactions, the SD contribution can also be present through ALP-quark interactions at tree-level. It is naively anticipated that the SI contribution would be dominant due to its coherent enhancement. In this paper, we show that is not generically the case; in particular, for naturally sized ALP couplings to quarks of order m q / f a , the SD interaction induced by ALP- π 0 mixing turns out to be the leading contribution to μ e conversion. Intuitively, this stems from the suppressed dipole contribution by the QED one-loop factor which counters the effect of SI coherent enhancement. Our study highlights the importance of μ e conversion searches in exploring the parameter space of generic ALP models, and demonstrates the competitiveness of these searches in probing the CLFV ALP parameter space in the heavy mass range of m a m μ .

Published by the American Physical Society 2024

Sponsoring Organization:
USDOE Office of Science (SC), Nuclear Physics (NP); USDOE National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA)
Grant/Contract Number:
89233218CNA000001
OSTI ID:
2335544
Alternate ID(s):
OSTI ID: 2346088
Journal Information:
Physical Review. D., Journal Name: Physical Review. D. Journal Issue: 7 Vol. 109; ISSN PRVDAQ; ISSN 2470-0010
Publisher:
American Physical SocietyCopyright Statement
Country of Publication:
United States
Language:
English

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