Search for Charged Lepton Flavour Violation with the LHCb Experiment

by Marcus Jonathan Madurai (University of Birmingham (GB))

Wednesday 28 Oct 2026, 13:30 → 14:30 Europe/London

Small Lecture Theatre (Poynting)

Lepton flavour violation (LFV) has been firmly established in the neutrino sector through oscillation measurements, but is essentially absent in the charged sector of the Standard Model, where loop-induced contributions to the decay rate are suppressed to O(10⁻⁵⁴). Any observation of a charged LFV decay would therefore provide unambiguous evidence for physics beyond the SM. The first search for the lepton-flavour violating decay B⁺→π⁺μ^±e^∓B⁺→π⁺μ^±e^∓ using proton-proton collisions is presented, using data collected by the LHCb experiment between 2011 and 2018 corresponding to an integrated luminosity of 9 fb^-1. The sensitivity of this search exceeds that of previous experiments by two orders of magnitude. I also review the impact and methods to reduce backgrounds due to material interactions at LHCb.