Lepton family number violation
At present there is evidence from neutrino oscillation searches that the neutrinos are in fact massive particles and that they mix. If confirmed, this would imply that the conservation of LFN is not exact. Lepton family number violation (LFNV) has been searched for with impressive sensitivities in many processes involving charged leptons. The present experimental limits on some of them (those which the author shall consider here) are shown in Table 1. These stringent limits are not inconsistent with the neutrino oscillation results since, given the experimental bounds on the masses of the known neutrinos and the neutrino mass squared differences required by the oscillation results, the effects of LFNV from neutrino mixing would be too small to be seen elsewhere (see Section 2). The purpose of experiments searching for LFNV involving the charged leptons is to probe the existence of other sources of LFNV. Such sources are present in many extensions of the SM. In this lecture the author shall discuss some of the possibilities, focusing on processes that require muon beams. Other LFNV processes, such as the decays of the kaons and of the {tau}, provide complementary information. In the next Section he shall consider some sources of LFNV that do not require an extension of the gauge group of the SM (the added leptons or Higgs bosons may of course originate from models with extended gauge groups). In Section 3 he discusses LFNV in left-right symmetric models. In Section 4 he considers LFNV in supersymmetric models, first in R-parity conserving supersymmetric grand unified models, and then in the minimal supersymmetric standard model with R-parity violation. The last section is a brief summary of the author`s conclusions.
- Research Organization:
- Los Alamos National Lab. (LANL), Los Alamos, NM (United States)
- Sponsoring Organization:
- USDOE Assistant Secretary for Management and Administration, Washington, DC (United States)
- DOE Contract Number:
- W-7405-ENG-36
- OSTI ID:
- 350968
- Report Number(s):
- LA-UR-99-293; CONF-980891-; ON: DE99002012; TRN: AHC29921%%154
- Resource Relation:
- Conference: ZUOZ summer school on hidden symmetries and Higgs phenomena, Villigen (Switzerland), 17-22 Aug 1998; Other Information: PBD: [1999]
- Country of Publication:
- United States
- Language:
- English
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