Lyubovitskij, Valery

We found a new important tree-level contribution to muon–electron nuclear conversion from neutrino exchange between two quarks in the same nucleon and demonstrated that this process, contrary to common belief, can be observed in the near future experiments if there exists a mixed sterile-active neutrino state νh heavier than the quark confinement scale Λc ∼ 1 GeV. From the present non-observation of muon–electron conversion we derive new experimental constraints on νh − νe,µ mixing

We study nuclear µ−–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 (L/f ). 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 φ meson. This allows us to extract new limits on the L/f lepton–quark effective couplings from the existing experimental data.