Theoretical and Experimental Constraints in the $\mu$--$\tau$ Four-Lepton Sector of the SMEFT: implications to neutrino self interactions

Abstract

We study the dimension-six SMEFT four-lepton operators in the $\mu$--$\tau$ sector. These operators control both charged-lepton scattering and neutrino self-interactions, the latter being weakly constrained by direct laboratory probes despite their importance for cosmological tensions. We compare three classes of constraints on the Warsaw-basis coefficients $[C_{\ell\ell}]_{2222}$, $[C_{\ell\ell}]_{2233}$, and $[C_{\ell\ell}]_{2332}$. We use perturbative unitarity from $2\!\to\!2$ partial-wave analysis, spin-summing positivity sum rules, and the experimental bounds from NA64$\mu$ and the global fit~\cite{Falkowski:2017pss}. We find that the global fit dominates for $[C_{\ell\ell}]_{2222}$ and $[C_{\ell\ell}]_{2332}$, while NA64$\mu$ provides the leading bound on $[C_{\ell\ell}]_{2233}$, with the unitarity line for this direction entering the range of collider energies near $200~\mathrm{GeV}$. Renormalization-group running between $1~\mathrm{GeV}$ and $30~\mathrm{TeV}$ modifies these coefficients by up to $10\%$. Translating these bounds onto the effective four-neutrino coupling $G_\mathrm{eff}$, we find values many orders of magnitude smaller than the strongly interacting regime motivated by the Hubble tension; this excludes heavy-mediator UV completions of strong $\nu_{\mu}$--$\nu_{\mu}$ and $\nu_\mu$--$\nu_\tau$ self-interactions within the validity of the dimension-six SMEFT and in the absence of tuned cancellations between operators, while leaving the cosmologically motivated light-mediator scenarios unconstrained by this analysis. Finally, we comment on the bounds these coefficients place on a leptophilic $L_\mu - L_\tau$ $Z'$ UV completion. Our SMEFT-based current and projected NA64$\mu$ bounds reproduce the dedicated $Z'$ analyses already available in the literature.