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Mu-Tau Production at Hadron Colliders

Motivated by large nu_mu-nu_tau flavor mixing, we consider mu-tau production at hadron colliders via dimension-6 effective operators, which can be attributed to new physics in the flavor sector at a higher scale Lambda. Current bounds on many of these operators from low energy experiments are very weak or nonexistent, and they may lead to clean mu+tau- and mu-tau+ signals at hadron colliders. At the Tevatron with 8 inverse femtobarns, one can exceed current bounds for most operators, with most 2 sigma sensitivities being in the 6-24 TeV range. We find that at the LHC with 1 (100) inverse femtobarns integrated luminosity, one can reach a 2 sigma sensitivity for Lambda \sim 3-10 TeV (Lambda =\sim 6-21 TeV), depending on the Lorentz structure of the operator. For some operators, an improvement of several orders of magnitude in sensitivity can be obtained with only a few tens of inverse picobarns at the LHC.