Five-body leptonic decays of muon and tau leptons

Abstract

We study the five-body decays $μ^- \to e^- e^+ e^- ν_μ \barν_{e}$ and $τ^- \to \ell^- \ell'^+\ell'^-ν_τ\barν_{\ell}$ for $\ell, \ell'=e, μ$ within the Standard Model (SM) and in a general effective field theory description of the weak interactions at low energies. We compute the branching ratios and compare our results with two previous, mutually discrepant, SM calculations. By assuming a general structure for the weak currents we derive the expressions for the energy and angular distributions of the three charged leptons when the decaying lepton is polarized, which will be useful in precise tests of the weak charged current at Belle II. In these decays, leptonic $\mathbf{T}$-odd correlations in triple products of spin and momenta --which may signal time reversal violation in the leptonic sector-- are suppressed by the tiny neutrino masses. Therefore, a measurement of such $\mathbf{T}$-violating observables would be associated to neutrinoless lepton flavor violating (LFV) decays, where this effect is not extremely suppressed. We also study the backgrounds that the SM five-lepton lepton decays constitute to searches of LFV $L^- \to \ell^- \ell'^+\ell'^-$ decays. Searches at high values of the invariant mass of the $\ell'^+\ell'^-$ pair look the most convenient way to overcome the background.