Top quark flavor changing couplings at a muon collider

Abstract

There is growing interest in the development of a muon collider that would make it possible to produce lepton collisions at energies of several TeV. Among others, there can be significant contributions to electroweak gauge boson, Higgs boson and top quark physics. In this work we pay attention to the latter, in particular, effective flavor-changing top-quark interactions. We discuss two flavor changing \(t \bar q\) (\(q=u,c\)) production processes that can be a good probe of the dimension-six top quark and gauge boson operators in the SMEFT. We consider all nine operators that can generate flavor-changing top quak couplings. After comparing with the current LHC limits, we identify two of them that have the highest sensitivity. On the other hand, for two others the sensitivity is so low that they can be safely discarded from future studies.