Leptonic Universality Breaking in ϒ Decays as a Probe of New Physics

In this work, we examine the possible existence of new physics beyond the standard model which could modify the branching fractions of the leptonic (mainly tauonic) decays of bottomonium vector resonances below the [Formula: see text] threshold. The decay width is factorized as the product of two pieces: (a) the probability of an intermediate pseudoscalar color-singlet [Formula: see text] state (coupling to the dominant Fock state of the Upsilon via a magnetic dipole transition) and a soft (undetected) photon; (b) the annihilation width of the [Formula: see text] pair into two leptons, mediated by a non-standard CP-odd Higgs boson of mass about 10 GeV, introducing a quadratic dependence on the lepton mass in the partial width. The process would be unwittingly ascribed to the ϒ leptonic channel thereby (slightly) breaking lepton universality. A possible mixing of the pseudoscalar Higgs and bottomonium resonances is also considered. Finally, several experimental signatures to check out the validity of the conjecture are discussed.