Remmen Grant N, Rodd Nicholas L
Center for Theoretical Physics and Department of Physics, University of California, Berkeley, California 94720, USA and Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, Berkeley, California 94720, USA.
Phys Rev Lett. 2020 Aug 21;125(8):081601. doi: 10.1103/PhysRevLett.125.081601.
We use unitarity and analyticity of scattering amplitudes to constrain fermionic operators in the standard model effective field theory. For four-fermion operators at mass dimension 8, we scatter flavor superpositions in fixed standard model representations and find the Wilson coefficients to be constrained so that their contraction with any pair of pure density matrices is positive. These constraints imply that flavor-violating couplings are upper bounded by their flavor-conserving cousins. For instance, LEP data already appears to preclude certain operators in upcoming μ→3e measurements.