Search for charged-lepton flavor violation in the production and decay of top quarks using trilepton final states

Abstract

This document describes a search for charged-lepton flavor violation (CLFV) in the production and decay of top quarks using 138 fb$^{-1}$ of data collected by the CMS experiment at a center-of-mass energy of 13 TeV. Events are selected for analysis if they contain an opposite-sign electron-muon pair, a third charged lepton (electron or muon), at least one jet, and at most one jet associated with a bottom quark. The analysis utilizes boosted decision trees to separate background processes from a possible signal. The data were found to be consistent with the standard model expectation. Exclusion limits were placed on different CLFV interactions, constituting the most stringent limits to date on these processes.