Lepton Flavour Violating top decays at the LHC

Abstract

We consider lepton flavour violating decays of the top quark, mediated by four-fermion operators. We compile constraints on a complete set of SU(3)*U(1)-invariant operators, arising from their loop contributions to rare decays and from HERA's single top search. The bounds on e-mu flavour change are more restrictive than l-tau; nonetheless the top could decay to a jet $+ e \bar{\mu}$ with a branching ratio of order $10^{-3}$. We estimate that the currently available LHC data (20 inverse-fb at 8 TeV) could be sensitive to $BR(t \to e \bar{\mu}$+ jet) $ \sim 6\times 10^{-5}$, and extrapolate that 100 inverse-fb at 13 TeV could reach a sensitivity of $ \sim 1 \times 10^{-5}$.