Speaker
Description
The forthcoming Mu2e and COMET experiments will search for electrons produced via the neutrinoless conversion of muons captured onto an aluminum nucleus, improving existing limits on charged lepton flavor violation (CLFV) by roughly four orders of magnitude and probing new physics at scales in excess of 10,000 TeV. If a positive signal is observed at Mu2e/COMET, the highest priority will be to determine the nature of the new physics responsible. Connecting the results of these low-energy experiments to candidate UV theories is a significant theoretical challenge. I will describe a tower of effective field theories that bridges this gap, providing a complete description of muon-to-electron conversion and allowing one to predict experimental rates for arbitrary UV theories. Conventionally, experiments measure/constrain a single number, the rate for muon-to-electron conversions that leave the nucleus in the ground state. I will describe how transitions to excited nuclear final states modify the shape of the measured electron spectrum, providing detailed information about the nature of the underlying CLFV interaction.
