A charming decade: using colliders to probe the charm sector of the Standard Model and Beyond

This proposal enriches the huge potential of flavour physics to discover and test fundamental properties of particle physics, by focusing on the unexplored charm flavour sector.

The latter offers a unique opportunity to scrutinize flavour transitions of the up-type, and requires for this purpose urgent theoretical progress on several fronts.

There will be much improvement in the charm flavour sector from the experimental side, of which the recent observation of charge-parity (CP) violation is just the beginning.

As a result of exploiting available and future data, theoretical investigations of charm physics will lead to a better understanding of the Standard Model (SM), both its strong and weak sectors, and will provide new insights into the structure of its possible extensions.The first goal of this proposal is to improve the description of the hadronic dynamics in the charm flavour sector in the SM thanks to data-driven approaches, to meet the extraordinary accuracy of upcoming experimental measurements.

With a better understanding of the strong dynamics, necessary to probe the weak interactions, I will design observables (branching ratios, angular distributions and CP asymmetries) having an increased sensitivity to energy scales much above the current reach of high-energy colliders.The second goal of this proposal is to probe New Physics (NP) effective operators that involve the charm flavour.

By combining direct (i.e., charm-quark decays) and indirect (i.e., effects induced by quantum corrections) constraints, I will set stringent and robust bounds on NP effective operators involving charm flavour.

More optimistically, rather than setting constraints, data may lead to the clear observation of NP in charm-quark transitions, which would certainly be a major breakthrough in particle physics.None of these goals has been so far fulfilled, and their importance is further leveraged by ongoing experiments that will span their range of activity over this decade.