The lepton-flavour violating decay \tau \to \mu \mu \antimu at the LHC

Abstract

Lepton-flavour violating tau-decays are predicted in many extensions of the Standard Model at a rate observable at future collider experiments. In this article we focus on the decay tau to mu mu antimu, which is a promising channel to observe lepton-flavour violation at the Large Hadron Collider LHC. We present analytic expressions for the differential decay width derived from a model-independent effective Lagrangian with general four-fermion operators, and estimate the experimental acceptance for detecting the decay tau to mu mu antimu at the LHC. Specific emphasis is given to decay angular distributions and how they can be used to discriminate new physics models. We provide specific predictions for various extensions of the Standard Model, including supersymmetric, little Higgs and technicolour models.