Renormalization Group Evolution of Dimension-seven Operators in Standard Model Effective Field Theory and Relevant Phenomenology

Abstract: We showed in a previous publication that there are six independent dimension-seven operators violating both lepton and baryon numbers ($L=-B=1$) and twelve ones violating lepton but preserving baryon number ($L=2,~B=0$) in standard model effective field theory, and we calculated one-loop renormalization for the former six operators. In this work we continue our efforts on renormalization of the operators. It turns out this could become subtle because the operators are connected by nontrivial relations when fermion flavors are counted. This kind of relations does not appear in lower dimensional operators. We show how we can extract anomalous dimension matrix for a flavor-specified basis of operators from counterterms computed for the above flavor-blind operators without introducing singular inverse Yukawa coupling matrices. As a phenomenological application, we investigate renormalization group effects on nuclear neutrinoless double $\beta$ decay. We also discuss very briefly its analog in the meson sector, $K^\pm\to\pi^\mp\mu^\pm\mu^\pm$, and indicate potential difficulties to compute its decay width.