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

Abstract

Abstract We study charged lepton flavor violation (CLFV) associated with heavy quark pair production in lepton-nucleon deep-inelastic scattering ℓiN → ℓjq$$ \overline{q} $$ q ¯ X. Here ℓi and ℓj 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.