Abstract:

Charged lepton flavor violating processes have never been observed. They are highly suppressed in the Standard Model, but many well-motivated theories beyond the Standard Model such as supersymmetric grand unified theories or theories with extra dimensions predict sizable rates that can exceed present experimental bounds. Observation of charged lepton flavor violation would, therefore, be unambiguous evidence of new physics beyond the Standard Model. The mu -> e + gamma decay mode in particular has been used extensively to search for new physics by many experiments in the past. The MEG collaboration is currently searching for this specific decay mode with unprecedented sensitivity by using innovative detector technologies and the world's most intense DC muon beam at the Paul Scherrer Institute near Zurich, Switzerland. In this seminar the current status, latest results and future outlook of the MEG experiment will be presented.