Abstract

We study nuclear ?- - e- conversion in the general framework of an effective Lagrangian approach without referring to any specific realization of the physics beyond the standard model (SM) responsible for lepton flavor violation (? f). We examine the impact of a specific hadronization prescription on the analysis of new physics in nuclear ?- - e- conversion and stress the importance of vector meson exchange between lepton and nucleon currents. A new issue of this mechanism is the presence of the strange quark vector current contribution induced by the ? meson. This allows us to extract new limits on the ? f lepton-quark effective couplings from the existing experimental data.