On the ultimate precision of meson mixing observables

Abstract

Meson mixing is considered to be an ideal candidate for new physics searches. Current experimental precision has greatly increased over the recent years, excelling in several cases the theoretical precision. A possible limit in the theoretical accuracy could be a hypothetical breakdown of quark-hadron duality. We propose a simple model for duality violations and give stringent bounds on such effects for mixing observables, indicating regions, where future measurements of $\Delta \Gamma_d$, $a_{sl}^d$ and $a_{sl}^s$ would be clear signals of new physics. Finally, we turn our attention to the charm sector, and reveal that already a modest duality violation of about $20 \%$ could explain the huge difference between HQE predictions for D-mixing and experimental data.Comment: 37 pages, 9 figures. v2 (very belated) update to journal version (plus extended appendices