Testing SUSY models of lepton flavor violation at a photon collider

Abstract

The loop level lepton flavor violating signals $γγ\to \ell \ell' (\ell=e,μ,τ, \ell \neq \ell^\prime)$ are studied in a scenario of low-energy, R-parity conserving, supersymmetric seesaw mechanism within the context of a high energy photon collider. Lepton flavor violation is due to off diagonal elements in the left s-lepton mass matrix induced by renormalization group equations. The average slepton masses ${\widetilde{m}}$ and the off diagonal matrix elements $Δm$ are treated as model independent free phenomenological parameters in order to discover regions in the parameter space where the signal cross section may be observable. At the energies of the $γγ$ option of the future high-energy linear collider the signal has a potentially large standard model background, and therefore particular attention is paid to the study of kinematical cuts in order to reduce the latter at an acceptable level. We find, for the ($eτ$) channel, non-negligible fractions of the parameter space ($δ_{LL}=Δm^2/\widetilde{m}^2 \gtrsim 10^{-1}$) where the statistical significance ($SS$) is $SS \gtrsim 3$.