This article reviews the current theoretical and experimental status of the field of muon decay and its potential to search for new physics beyond the Standard Model. The importance of rare muon processes with lepton flavor violation is highly stressed, together with precision measurements of normal muon decay. Recent up-to-date motivations of lepton flavor violation based on supersymmetric models, in particular supersymmetric grand unified theories, are described along with other theoretical models. Future prospects of experiments and muon sources of high intensity for further progress in this field are also discussed.

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The coherent µ-e conversion rates in various nuclei are calculated for general lepton flavor violating interactions. We solve the Dirac equations numerically for the initial state muon and the final state electron in the Coulomb force, and perform the overlap integrals between the wave functions and the nucleon densities. The results indicate that the conversion branching ratio increases for a light nucleus up to the atomic number Z ∼ 30, is largest for Z = 30 -60, and becomes smaller for a heavy nucleus with Z 60. We also discuss the uncertainty from the input proton and neutron densities. The atomic number dependence of the conversion ratio calculated here is useful to distinguish theoretical models with lepton flavor violation. *

We study new physics effects on the couplings of weak gauge bosons with the lightest CP-even Higgs boson ($h$), $hZZ$, and the tri-linear coupling of the lightest Higgs boson, $hhh$, at the one loop order, as predicted by the two Higgs doublet model. Those renormalized coupling constants can deviate from the Standard Model (SM) predictions due to two distinct origins; the tree level mixing effect of Higgs bosons and the quantum effect of additional particles in loop diagrams. The latter can be enhanced in the renormalized $hhh$ coupling constant when the additional particles show the non-decoupling property. Therefore, even in the case where the $hZZ$ coupling is close to the SM value, deviation in the $hhh$ coupling from the SM value can become as large as plus 100 percent, while that in the $hZZ$ coupling is at most minus 1 percent level. Such large quantum effect on the Higgs tri-linear coupling is distinguishable from the tree level mixing effect, and is expected to be detectable at a future linear collider.Comment: 52 pages, 10 figures, revtex