Charged leptons with nanosecond lifetimes.

Abstract

Some extensions of the standard model contain additional leptons which are vectorlike under weak isospin. A class of models is considered in which these leptons do not appreciably mix with the known leptons. In such models, the heavy charged lepton and the heavy neutrino are degenerate in mass, and the degeneracy is broken by radiative corrections. The mass splitting is calculated and found to be very weakly dependent on the lepton mass, varying from 250 to 330 MeV as the mass varies from 100 to 800 GeV. This result is {\it not} affected significantly by inclusion in a supersymmetric model in spite of the additional loops involving the superpartners. As a result, this fairly general class of models has a charged lepton whose lifetime varies in the narrow range from 0.5 to 2.0 nanoseconds, and which decays into neutrals plus a very low energy electron or muon.