Constraints on leptoquarks from lepton-flavour-violating tau-lepton processes

Abstract

Leptoquarks are ubiquitous in several extensions of the Standard Model and seem to be able to accommodate the universality-violation-driven $B$-meson-decay anomalies and the $(g-2)_\mu$ discrepancy interpreted as deviations from the Standard Model predictions. In addition, the search for lepton-flavour violation in the charged sector is, at present, a major research program that could also be facilitated by the dynamics generated by leptoquarks. In this article, we consider a rather wide framework of both scalar and vector leptoquarks as the generators of lepton-flavour violation in processes involving the tau lepton. We single out its couplings to leptoquarks, thus breaking universality in the lepton sector, and we integrate out leptoquarks at tree level, generating the corresponding dimension-6 operators of the Standard Model Effective Field Theory. In Ref. [1] we obtained model-independent bounds on the Wilson coefficients of those operators contributing to lepton-flavour-violating hadron tau decays and $\ell$-$\tau$ conversion in nuclei, with $\ell=e,\mu$. Hence, we use those results to translate the bounds into the couplings of leptoquarks to the Standard Model fermions.