AbstractsPhysics

Flavour violating processes have never been observed for charged leptons, electron, muon and tau. The existence of charged lepton flavour violating (CLFV) processes is however expected, since flavour is violated by all the other fermions of the standard model (SM). In the standard model the neutrinos are massless, which forbids the mixing of neutrino flavour and also the violation of lepton flavour. The zero mass of the neutrinos in the SM is in conflict with the experimentally observed neutrino oscillations. The standard model has to be extended to include massive neutrinos. The easiest way to explain the neutrino mass is to assume that they acquire masses in the same way as the rest of the SM fermions: in the Higgs mechanism. This way however leads to problems with the naturality of the neutrino Yukawa coupling. One of the most popular methods of generating the neutrino mass is the so called seesaw mechanism (type-I). The standard model, extended with the neutrino masses, allows the charged lepton flavour to be violated. This leads to unobservably small transition rates however. Therefore an observation of charged lepton flavour violating process would be a clear evidence of the existence of new physics beyond the standard model and it's trivial extensions. To have hope of ever observing charged lepton flavour violating processes, there must be an extension of the standard model which produces observable, though small, rates for CLFV processes. One of the most popular extensions of the standard model is the so called minimal supersymmetric standard model (MSSM). The neutrinos are massless in the MSSM, as they are in SM, and therefore CLFV processes are forbidden in the MSSM. Luckily the neutrino masses can be generated via seesaw mechanism in the MSSM as well as in the SM. The MSSM contains more potential sources for CLFV processes than the SM. The extra sources are the soft mass parameters of the sleptons. In supersymmetric models the sleptons couple to the leptons through the slepton-lepton-gaugino-vertices. These generate the CLFV processes at the loop-level. Often the off-diagonal soft terms are assumed zero in the MSSM at the input scale, where the supersymmetry breaks. Experiments are done at much lower electroweak scale. The soft SUSY-breaking terms acquire large radiative corrections as they are run from the input scale down to the electroweak scale. Here the seesaw mechanism kicks in. The seesaw mechanism brings with it the off-diagonal neutrino Yukawa coupling matrices. This allows the off-diagonal slepton mass terms to evolve non-zero at the electroweak scale. In this thesis the charged lepton flavour violation is discussed first in the context of the standard model. Then the CLFV processes, l(i) → l(j) γ, l(i) → l(j)l(k)l(l) ja l(i) ↔ l(j), are studied in the most general way: in the effective theories. Finally the charged lepton flavour violation is studied in the supersymmetric theories in general and more specifically in the minimal supersymmetric standard model…