Lepton flavor violation in type I + III seesaw

In the presence of a low scale seesaw of type I + III, flavor violating effects in the leptonic sector are expected. Their presence in the charged sector is due to the mixing of the fermionic vector-like weak triplets with the chiral doublets, which cause non-universality of the tree-level Z coupling. We investigate the bounds on the Yukawa couplings which are responsible for the mixing and present the results for two minimal cases, a fermionic triplet with a singlet or two fermionic triplets. Different channels for these processes are considered and their current and future potential to probe these couplings is discussed.Comment: 20 pages, 2 figures; corrected misprints, conclusions unchange

FCNC portals to the dark sector

The most general basis of operators parametrizing a low-scale departure from the SM particle content is constructed. The SM gauge invariance is enforced, and operators of lowest dimensions are retained separately for a new light neutral particle of spin 0, 1/2, 1, and 3/2. The basis is further decomposed into couplings to the SM Higgs/gauge fields, to pairs of quark/lepton fields, and to baryon/lepton number violating combinations of fermion fields. This basis is then used to systematically investigate the discovery potential of the rare FCNC decays of the K and B mesons with missing energy in the final state. The most sensitive decay modes in the s to d, b to d, and b to s sectors are identified and compared for each type of couplings to the new invisible state.Comment: 55 pages. Minor corrections & references added. To appear in JHE

Back to 1974: The Q\mathcal Q-onium

We show that the 750 GeV di-photon excess could be explained by the ${\mathcal Q}-$onium system of a new QCD-like theory with fermions vectorial under the SM. Beside the spin-0 di-photon singlet this scenario predicts almost degenerate colored scalars and spin-1 resonances analogous to the $J/\Psi$ in QCD. All these states are within the reach of the LHC. An apparent large width can be explained as due to production of excited states with splitting $\Delta m\sim \Gamma$.Comment: 6 pages. v2: QCD effects and splitting of SU(2) multiplets added. v3: final version to appear in PL

Shedding light on CP violation in the charm system via D to V gamma decays

Recent evidence for direct CP violation in non-leptonic charm decays cannot be easily accommodated within the Standard Model (SM). On the other hand, it fits well in new physics models generating CP violating Delta C=1 chromomagnetic dipole operators. We show that in these frameworks sizable direct CP asymmetries in radiative D to P+ P- gamma decays (P=pi,K), with M_PP close to the rho or the phi peak, can be expected. Enhanced matrix elements of the electromagnetic dipole operators can partly compensate the long distance dominance in these decays, leading to CP asymmetries of the order of several percent. If observed at this level, these would provide a clean signal of physics beyond the SM and of new dynamics associated to dipole operators. We briefly comment on related CP violating observables accessible via time dependent D(Dbar) to P+ P- gamma studies and angular decay product distributions in rare semileptonic D decays.Comment: 5 page