Improved Bounds and Global Fit of Flavor-Violating Charged Lepton Yukawa Couplings post LHC

Abstract: Higgs couplings to charged leptons form an important measurement to understand not only the Standard Model (SM), but also physics Beyond Standard Models (BSM). In this work, we update the bounds on the Flavor-Violating (FV) Higgs couplings to charged leptons. We find that the bounds on the size of the couplings could range between $\sim \mathcal{O}(10^{-3}) - \mathcal{O}(10^{-6})$. In fact, the direct constraints from LHC are much stronger than those inferred indirectly from rare decays in the $\tau$-$\mu$ and $\tau$-$e$ sector. We also match these bounds to the SM Effective Field Theory (SMEFT) and find lower limits on the scale of New Physics (NP). We find that the scale of NP ranges between $\sim \mathcal{O}(10) - \mathcal{O}(100)$ TeV. We also present future projections for some upcoming experiments. We find that the current bounds on the couplings to $\mu$-$e$ are stronger than all future projections.