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Correlating Non-Resonant Di-Electron Searches at the LHC to the Cabibbo-Angle Anomaly and Lepton Flavour Universality Violation

In addition to the existing strong indications for lepton flavour university violation (LFUV) in low energy precision experiments, CMS recently released an analysis of non-resonant di-lepton pairs which could constitute the first sign of LFUV in high-energy LHC searches. In this article we show that the Cabibbo angle anomaly, an (apparent) violation of first row and column CKM unitarity with $\approx3\,σ$ significance, and the CMS result can be correlated and commonly explained in a model independent way by the operator $[Q_{\ell q}^{(3)}]_{1111} = (\bar{\ell}_1γ^μσ^I\ell_1)(\bar{q}_1γ_μσ^Iq_1)$. This is possible without violating the bounds from the non-resonant di-lepton search of ATLAS (which interestingly also observed slightly more events than expected in the electron channel) nor from $R(π)=π\toμν/π\to e ν$. We find a combined preference for the new physics hypothesis of $4.5\,σ$ and predict $1.0004<R(π)<1.0009$ (95\%~CL) which can be tested in the near future with the forthcoming results of the PEN experiment.