Vector mesons in nuclear mu-e conversion

Abstract

We study nuclear mu-e conversion in the general framework of an effective Lagrangian approach without referring to any specific realization of the physics beyond the standard model (SM) responsible for lepton flavor violation (LFV). We show that vector meson exchange between lepton and nucleon currents plays an important role in this process. A new issue of this mechanism is the presence of the strange quark vector current contribution induced by the phi meson. This allows us to extract new limits on the LFV lepton-quark effective couplings from the existing experimental data.