Theorie-Palaver

April 22, 2025 at 2 p.m. in Lorentz room (Staudingerweg 7, 5th floor)

Upalaparna Banerjee

Marco Fedele

Yann Gouttenoire

Antonela Matijasic

Modern EFTs for muon bound states
Duarte Fontes (KIT)


Muon conversion — the process of a bound muon decaying into an energetic electron — is one of the best probes of charged lepton flavor violation. The experimental limit is soon expected to improve by four orders of magnitude, thus calling for precise predictions on the theory side. Equally important are precise predictions for muon decay-in-orbit, the main background for muon conversion. While the calculation of electromagnetic corrections to the two processes above the nuclear scale does not involve significant challenges, it becomes substantially more complex below that scale due to multiple scales, bound-state effects and experimental setup. In this talk, I present a systematic framework that addresses these challenges by resorting to a series of effective field theories. Combining Heavy Quark Effective Theory (HQET), Non-Relativistic QED (NRQED), potential NRQED, Soft-Collinear Effective Theory I and II, and boosted HQET, I derive a factorization theorem and present the renormalization group equations.