Flavour symmetries in the SMEFT

We analyse how $U(3)^5$ and $U(2)^5$ flavour symmetries act on the Standard Model Effective Field Theory, providing an organising principle to classify the large number of dimension-six operators involving fermion fields. A detailed counting of such operators, at different order in the breaking terms of both these symmetries, is presented. A brief discussion about possible deviations from these two reference cases, and a simple example of the usefulness of this classification scheme for high-$p_T$ analyses at the LHC, are also presented.Comment: 31 pages, 13 Table

Lepton Flavor Violation and Dilepton Tails at the LHC

Starting from a general effective Lagrangian for lepton flavor violation (LFV) in quark-lepton transitions, we derive constraints on the effective coefficients from the high-mass tails of the dilepton processes $pp \to \ell_k \ell_l$ (with $k\neq l$). The current (projected) limits derived in this paper from LHC data with $36~\mathrm{fb}^{-1}$ ($3~\mathrm{ab}^{-1}$) can be applied to generic new physics scenarios, including the ones with scalar, vector and tensor effective operators. For purely left-handed operators, we explicitly compare these LHC constraints with the ones derived from flavor-physics observables, illustrating the complementarity of these different probes. While flavor physics is typically more constraining for quark-flavor violating operators, we find that LHC provides the most stringent limits on several flavor-conserving ones. Furthermore, we show that dilepton tails offer the best probes for charm-quark transitions at current luminosities and that they provide competitive limits for tauonic $b\to d$ transitions at the high-luminosity LHC phase. As a by-product, we also provide general numerical expressions for several low-energy LFV processes, such as the semi-leptonic decays $K\to \pi \ell^{\pm}_k \ell^{\mp}_l$, $B\to \pi \ell^{\pm}_k \ell^{\mp}_l$ and $B\to K^{(\ast)} \ell^{\pm}_k \ell^{\mp}_l$.Comment: 14 pages, 2 figures, 5 tables, published versio

Drell-Yan Tails Beyond the Standard Model

We investigate the high-$p_T$ tails of the $pp\to \ell \nu$ and $pp \to \ell \ell$ Drell-Yan processes as probes of New Physics in semileptonic interactions with an arbitrary flavor structure. For this purpose, we provide a general decomposition of the $2\to2$ scattering amplitudes in terms of form-factors that we match to specific scenarios, such as the Standard Model Effective Field Theory (SMEFT), including all relevant operators up to dimension-$8$, as well as ultraviolet scenarios giving rise to tree-level exchange of new bosonic mediators with masses at the TeV scale. By using the latest LHC run-II data in the monolepton ($e\nu$, $\mu\nu$, $\tau\nu$) and dilepton ($ee$, $\mu\mu$, $\tau\tau$, $e\mu$, $e\tau$, $\mu\tau$) production channels, we derive constraints on the SMEFT Wilson coefficients for semileptonic four-fermion and dipole operators with the most general flavor structure, as well as on all possible leptoquark models. For the SMEFT, we discuss the range of validity of the EFT description, the relevance of $\mathcal{O}(1/\Lambda^2)$ and $\mathcal{O}(1/\Lambda^4)$ truncations, the impact of $d=8$ operators and the effects of different quark-flavor alignments. Finally, as a highlight, we extract for several New Physics scenarios the combined limits from high-$p_T$ processes, electroweak pole measurements and low-energy flavor data for the $b\to c\tau\nu$ transition, showing the complementarity between these different observables. Our results are compiled in {\tt HighPT}, a package in {\tt Mathematica} which provides a simple way for users to extract the Drell-Yan tails likelihoods for semileptonic effective operators and for leptoquark models.Comment: 61 pages, 19 figure

HighPT: A Tool for high-pTp_T Drell-Yan Tails Beyond the Standard Model

HighPT is a Mathematica package for the analysis of high-energy data of semileptonic transitions at hadron colliders. It allows to compute high-$p_T$ tail observables for semileptonic processes, i.e. Drell-Yan cross sections, for dilepton and monolepton final states at the LHC. These observables can be calculated at tree level within the Standard Model Effective Field Theory, including the relevant operators up to dimension eight to ensure a consistent description of the cross section including terms of $\mathcal{O}(\Lambda^{-4})$ in the cutoff scale $\Lambda$. For New Physics models with new mediators that can be resolved at LHC energies, HighPT can also account for the full propagation effects of these new bosonic states at tree level. Using the available data from the high-$p_T$ tails in the relevant LHC run-II searches by the ATLAS and CMS collaborations, HighPT can also construct the corresponding likelihoods for all possible flavors of the leptonic final states. As an illustration, we derive and compare constraints on Wilson coefficients at different orders in the Effective Field Theory expansion, and we investigate lepton flavor violation for the $S_3$ leptoquark model. The HighPT code is publicly available at https://github.com/HighPT/HighPT.Comment: 34 page

Reading the footprints of the B-meson flavor anomalies

Motivated by the recent LHCb announcement of a $3.1\sigma$ violation of lepton-flavor universality in the ratio $R_K=\Gamma(B\to K\mu^+\mu^-)/\Gamma(B\to K e^+ e^-)$, we present an updated, comprehensive analysis of the flavor anomalies seen in both neutral-current ($b\to s\ell^+\ell^-$) and charged-current ($b\to c\tau\bar\nu$) decays of $B$ mesons. Our study starts from a model-independent effective field-theory approach and then considers both a simplified model and a UV-complete extension of the Standard Model featuring a vector leptoquark $U_1$ as the main mediator of the anomalies. We show that the new LHCb data corroborate the emerging pattern of a new, predominantly left-handed, semileptonic current-current interaction with a flavor structure respecting a (minimally) broken $U(2)^5$ flavor symmetry. New aspects of our analysis include a combined analysis of the semileptonic operators involving tau leptons, including in particular the important constraint from $B_s$--$\bar B_s$ mixing, a systematic study of the effects of right-handed leptoquark couplings and of deviations from minimal flavor-symmetry breaking, a detailed analysis of various rare $B$-decay modes which would provide smoking-gun signatures of this non-standard framework (LFV decays, di-tau modes, and $B\to K^{(*)}\nu\bar\nu$), and finally an updated analysis of collider bounds on the leptoquark mass and couplings.Comment: 41 pages, 14 figures, 4 table