Searches for 25 rare and forbidden decays of D+ and Ds+ mesons

Abstract

A search is performed for rare and forbidden charm decays of the form $D_{\left(s\right)}^{+}\to h^{\pm }{\mathrm{\ell }}^{+}{\mathrm{\ell }}^{\left(\prime \right)\mp }$, where h^± is a pion or kaon and ℓ^(′)± is an electron or muon. The measurements are performed using proton-proton collision data, corresponding to an integrated luminosity of 1.6 fb⁻¹, collected by the LHCb experiment in 2016. No evidence is observed for the 25 decay modes that are investigated and 90 % confidence level limits on the branching fractions are set between 1.4 × 10⁻⁸ and 6.4 × 10⁻⁶. In most cases, these results represent an improvement on existing limits by one to two orders of magnitude.