# A Road Less Travelled and Beyond: Towards a Roadmap for Integrating
Sustainability into Computing Education

Ana Moreira  NOVA LINCS & NOVA University Lisbon Portugal ,  Ola Leifler
Linköping University Sweden ,  Stefanie Betz<EMAIL_ADDRESS>Furtwangen
University, Germany ,  Ian Brooks<EMAIL_ADDRESS>University of the West
of England Bristol, U.K. ,  Rafael Capilla<EMAIL_ADDRESS>Rey Juan
Carlos University, Spain ,  Vlad Constantin Coroamă  Roegen Centre for
Sustainability, Switzerland ,  Leticia Duboc  La Salle, Universitat Ramon
Llull, Spain ,  João Paulo Fernandes<EMAIL_ADDRESS>University of Porto,
Portugal ,  Rogardt Heldal<EMAIL_ADDRESS>Western Norway University of
Applied Sciences, Norway ,  Patricia Lago<EMAIL_ADDRESS>Vrije Universiteit
Amsterdam, Netherlands ,  Ngoc-Thanh Nguyen<EMAIL_ADDRESS>Western
Norway University of Applied Sciences, Norway ,  Shola Oyedeji  Lappeenranta-
Lahti University of Technology, Finland ,  Birgit Penzenstadler
<EMAIL_ADDRESS>Chalmers University of Technology, Sweden ,  Anne Kathrin
Peters<EMAIL_ADDRESS>KTH Royal Institute of Technology, Sweden ,  Jari
Porras<EMAIL_ADDRESS>Lappeenranta-Lahti University of Technology,
Finland and  Colin C. Venters<EMAIL_ADDRESS>University of Huddersfield,
U.K.

(2024)

###### Abstract.

Education for sustainable development has evolved to include more constructive
approaches and a better understanding of what is needed to align education
with the cultural, societal, and pedagogical changes required to avoid the
risks posed by an unsustainable society. This evolution aims to lead us toward
viable, equitable, and sustainable futures. However, computing education,
including software engineering, is not fully aligned with the current
understanding of what is needed for transformational learning in light of our
current challenges. This is partly because computing is primarily seen as a
technical field, focused on industry needs. Until recently, sustainability was
not a high priority for most businesses, including the digital sector, nor was
it a prominent focus for higher education institutions and society.

Given these challenges, we aim to propose a research roadmap to integrate
sustainability principles and essential skills into the crowded computing
curriculum, nurturing future software engineering professionals with a
sustainability mindset. We conducted two extensive studies: a systematic
review of academic literature on sustainability in computing education and a
survey of industry professionals on their interest in sustainability and
desired skills for graduates. Using insights from these studies, we identified
key topics for teaching sustainability, including core sustainability
principles, values and ethics, systems thinking, impact measurement, soft
skills, business value, legal standards, and advocacy. Based on these
findings, we will develop recommendations for future computing education
programs that emphasise sustainability.

$[$The paper is accepted at the 2030 Software Engineering workshop, which is
co-located with the FSE’24 conference.$]$

Software engineering, Sustainability, Computing, Education, Software
competencies, Software sustainability, Sustainable development goals,
Sustainable software, Skills

††copyright: acmlicensed††journalyear: 2024††doi: XXXXXXX.XXXXXXX††conference:
2030 Software Engineering Workshop; July 15–16, 2024; Porto de Galinhas,
Brazil††isbn: 978-1-4503-XXXX-X/18/06††ccs: Social and professional topics
Computing education

##  1\. Introduction

ICT systems and services are the backbone of modern society, deeply embedded
in every aspect of our lives, from health and commerce to communication,
education, energy, finance, defence and beyond. While these complex, large-
scale, software-intensive systems might be vital enablers for sustainable
development, their development and utilisation also present significant
sustainability challenges. Indeed, the impact of ICT on economic, societal,
and environmental sustainability is extensive, influencing areas such as
social equity, carbon emissions, and resource production and consumption
(Creutzig et al., 2022), and thus is particularly challenging to assess
(Bremer et al., 2023).

The complexity of our world has grown significantly, leading to an increased
reliance on computers to help us understand it. For example, considering that
80% of the ocean remains uncharted territory, we have nevertheless started
deep-sea mining, fish farms and offshore wind farms. Amidst such ventures,
where the potential impacts are largely unknown, data collection, analysis,
and monitoring are imperative (Nguyen et al., 2023). However, the use of
large-scale data collection and advanced AI tech is generally not directed
towards such goals, as societal goals tend to be directed towards economic
short-term advantages (Creutzig et al., 2022).

In short, our current deep and interlinked challenges call for “rethinking
growth, rethinking efficiency, rethinking the state, rethinking the commons,
and rethinking justice” (McPhearson et al., 2021), which in turn would call
for “redirecting digitalisation toward stabilisation of human and planetary
systems” (Creutzig et al., 2022) and move away from “narrow techno-economic
mindsets and ideologies of control” (Stoddard et al., 2021). This forward-
looking paradigm must prioritise minimising environmental impact, championing
social equity, and fostering economic resilience. It is, therefore, essential
to equip professionals and students with the knowledge, skills, and tools
needed to design, develop, and manage software and systems for such a
paradigm.

Education is a key leverage point in enabling transition mindsets and
providing opportunities to learn about alternative pathways forward (United
Nations Educational, Scientific, and Cultural Organization, 2017). As
educators, we can play an important role in designing educational frameworks
that instil a sustainability mindset among current and future ICT
professionals. Hence, the challenge is: How can we infuse sustainability
principles and cultivate essential skills and competencies in an already
crowded computing curriculum to nurture the future generation of software
engineering professionals with a sustainability mindset?

During the past three years, we focused on laying the foundation for
integrating sustainability into computing education, while identifying current
professionals’ training needs. This involved conducting two comprehensive
studies: one examining how academia addresses sustainability in teaching
(Peters et al., 2024), and the other engaging with industry to understand
their stated needs, challenges, and practices when handling sustainability in
their businesses (Heldal et al., 2024).

Drawing from the findings of these studies, we now propose initial insights to
inform the design of future programmes for integrating sustainability in
computing education and highlight open questions for a future roadmap.

Such a roadmap must differ from traditional approaches, emphasising broader
societal challenges and preparing students to navigate complex, wicked
problems by fostering personal development, self- and ethical awareness, and
the capacity to respond to complex problems with care and empathy.

This paper is structured as follows: Section 2 offers an overview of the two
studies that constitute the groundwork for the roadmap for teaching
sustainability to ICT students and professionals. Section 3 provides a
preliminary classification of the topics that could be considered in
sustainability training and education. Section 4 critically examines the
proposed topics in light of the results of the literature review on
sustainability in computing education, highlighting open questions within each
topic area. Finally, Section 5 concludes the paper and discusses some of the
challenges to propose a sustainability education curriculum with the power to
reform current computing education expectations.

##  2\. Background

The work presented in this paper is based on two prior studies, one studying
how sustainability has been considered and implemented in education (Peters et
al., 2024) and the other studying the needs and challenges of industry (Heldal
et al., 2024). We briefly outline the outcomes of these studies in the
following subsections as a foundation for this paper.

###  2.1. An overview of academic endeavours

Based on a systematic study of the scientific literature on sustainability in
computing education work we explored the current state of practice and which
changes would be called for given literature on education for sustainable
development and transformative education (Peters et al., 2024).

The literature review was based on an initial set of 473 papers from a
database search covering the period of 2000–2022, reduced to 45 papers to
specifically include papers addressing sustainability in computing education,
and later extended through snowballing to 89 papers. This set was analysed
with respect to the specific learning goals activities and research methods
employed. The analysis made comparisons of learning goals and activities to
what we found in the literature on learning for sustainable development, and
compared research methods to methods established through ACM empirical
standards.

The review concluded with recommendations and open questions around four
themes: (1) the research on sustainability in computing education in light of
the severity of our challenges and demands for unprecedented change, (2)
connections to research on equality, justice, norms, values and power, (3)
implications of current approaches to curriculum development and directions
for future work, and (4) limitations of existing research and outlook.

Through these themes, the review assessed approaches to include sustainability
in computing education and provided recommendations for change around several
axes: to make more meaningful, substantial changes that can engage with the
seriousness of the issues, to move away from a curricular alignment with
existing business profiles and towards exploration of new skills and
attitudes, to help students take action while being grounded in a mature
relationship to difficult emotions, to connect explicitly with work on
understanding power relations, equality and justice, to escape the “narrow
techno-economic mindset” (Stoddard et al., 2021) represented by computational
thinking, and to ensure that students can cope in a mature way with material
that challenges them emotionally (Pihkala, 2022).

As the literature review on computing education was ambivalent regarding
whether existing practices could offer specific guidance in light of this, it
ended with a series of open questions.

###  2.2. An industry perspective on the needed competencies and skills

In previous work, we explored industry’s views on the sustainability education
and training of software engineers (Heldal et al., 2024). To do so, we
conducted interviews and focus groups with IT and sustainability professionals
from 28 organisations across various sectors and countries. We aimed to learn
about (i) their interest in sustainability; (ii) their sustainability goals;
(iii) the sustainability-related competencies and skills needed to achieve
these goals.

Concerning their overall interest in sustainability, we asked companies about
four perspectives: business, customers, shareholders, and stakeholders. From
the business point of view, they highlighted the business opportunities and
increased competitiveness brought by sustainability. They also felt they had
to respond to customers’ environmental concerns and, to a lesser extent,
social concerns. Regarding shareholders, the economic benefits of the
companies were the unsurprising main interest, but social concerns were also
mentioned. Finally, employees’ interests, the media and the regulatory
framework were also mentioned as drivers to address sustainability within
their businesses.

When discussing their sustainability goals, interviewees sought to make their
processes and products more sustainable, recognising the need for a culture
change in their employees and customers. Achieving such goals required
collaboration with partners and external entities, and the transformation of
work processes, and technical tools. However, they noted that employees lacked
an understanding of sustainability and still saw it as a trade-off against
profit. Interviewees also complained about economic barriers and inadequate
policies, when trying to reach their sustainability goals.

When it came to the sustainability-related competencies and skills,
interviewed individuals acknowledged the importance of soft skills and
technical competencies, but six companies faced difficulties in hiring the
right talent with suitable sustainability-related skills. They wished their
employees to have better communication skills and knowledge about
sustainability metrics, so, they often resorted to training courses,
sustainability consultants and collaborations with universities.

Finally, noting how interviewees referred to the different sustainability
dimensions was also interesting. Most of them talked about environmental
issues, such as carbon emissions and climate change. Those discussing the
economic dimension often meant the company’s ability to maintain its profits
over time. The social dimension was mostly addressed through initiatives for
employees’ well-being, customer satisfaction, and societal welfare. Finally,
for the technical aspects, some mentioned well-known software qualities, such
as reusability, robustness, and security. Surprisingly, only a minority of
companies mentioned the UN Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs).

From the insights we got from these interviews, we highlight that
professionals need: (1) a comprehensive understanding of the multiple
dimensions of sustainability and their alignment to business opportunities;
(2) proficiency in soft and sustainability skills to promote awareness among
employees, customers, and collaborators; and (3) tools and metrics to
integrate sustainability into their businesses’ products and processes. The
Code book 111Codebook access link: https://bit.ly/3wgt0dp of the interviews is
shared as supplementary material to help readers better understand our
insights.

##  3\. Insights for a future education programme

An increasing number of Higher Education Institutions (HEI) recognise the need
to align education with the need for societal transformations that our
challenges demand. While it is acknowledged that the integration process is
challenging (Fiselier and Longhurst, 2018), there is some guidance available
for educators in computing, such as the European sustainability competence
framework (GreenComp) (Bianchi et al., 2022) and the UK QAA/HEA guidance on
incorporating Education for Sustainable Development into the curricula
(Quality Assurance Agency for Higher Education and Advance HE, 2021).

Based on our interpretation of the results from our two studies (Heldal et
al., 2024; Peters et al., 2024) we constructed a preliminary classification of
topics to be taught when designing a curriculum for future courses in
computing integrating sustainability. This classification reflects our
perspective on key considerations, stemming from intensive discussions in
regular workshops among the authors, alongside our extensive research and
teaching experience in the field. It is worth noting that while this
classification is not exhaustive, it underscores pivotal areas we believe
merit focus. Our proposal goes beyond the core sustainability knowledge
outlined in (Glasser and Hirsh, 2016; Bianchi et al., 2022) which proposes a
list of the minimum competencies designed to facilitate transformative
systems’ changes to enhance the overall quality of life. Additionally, our
focus extends to encompass soft skills, technical sustainability, the business
rationale for sustainability, assessing sustainability impacts and metrics,
ethical considerations and values, legal requirements and standards, and
advocacy and lobbying efforts. In the following, we describe the importance of
each topic, how it relates to our studies, and identify education
opportunities.

#### Core sustainability concepts

Building a sustainable future demands that communities and individuals are
cognisant of sustainability principles and the ramifications of human actions
on the interconnected environmental, economic, and social dimensions of
sustainability. Given the fundamental role of ICT systems and services in
modern society, sustainability must be considered an essential cornerstone for
every IT product or service.

We observed a lack of consensus among industry professionals regarding the
definition of sustainability. Fourteen organisations (50% of the total) cited
a significant challenge in understanding sustainability concepts.
Additionally, while 10 organisations appeared to view sustainability primarily
through the lens of environmental concerns, a smaller number also mentioned
technical, social and economic concerns. Furthermore, 12 organisations
explicitly acknowledged sustainability as intertwined with multiple
dimensions. Surprisingly, only four mentioned the Sustainable Development
Goals as pertinent to their operations.

Insufficient comprehension of sustainability’s core concepts may lead to
various challenges: perceiving it as an optional feature rather than a crucial
aspect; struggling to collaborate with sustainability experts, and might not
fully see the value of it; shying away from public debate on technology and
sustainability, not advocating policy changes; seeing it as an auxiliary skill
to IT rather than an integral component.

Education plays a pivotal role in providing knowledge of sustainability’s
basic principles, concepts, and models. This includes defining and scoping
sustainability, dispelling prevalent misconceptions and myths, presenting
current statistics, elucidating key concepts (e.g., dimensions of
sustainability (Penzenstadler, 2014), sustainable development
goals222https://sdgs.un.org/goals), and introducing various models for
contextualising sustainability (e.g., the doughnut model (Raworth, 2017), the
nine planetary boundaries (Richardson et al., 2023), and orders of impact
(Hilty and Aebischer, 2015)).

#### Values and Ethics

Ultimately, values and ethics are fundamental concerns to making the world a
fair and equitable place (Shearman, 1990). While ethics are culturally agreed-
upon moral principles, “values make no moral judgment” (Whittle, 2019, p.
113). Currently, our society relies on software systems to communicate
worldwide and operate utilities providing the basics for human life (e.g.,
complex medical machines, nuclear plants, and electrical grids). Such systems
focus on functionality and quality attributes, such as usability,
availability, and security, but they do not respect basic human values, such
as social justice, transparency, or diversity (Schwartz, 2007). Sustainable
systems, however, should be aligned with core human values.

Over 57% of the interviewed organisations reveal that their customers and
stakeholders want to protect the environment, and almost 30% are interested in
focusing on sustainability due to moral concerns and social matters, resulting
in the need for sustainability-value alignment of their business. Therefore,
it is important that IT and professionals are guided by a clear code of
ethics, such as the ACM code of ethics (Gotterbarn et al., 1997) to produce
socially and environmentally responsible systems.

As educators, we call for ethics to be a standard part of software engineering
(Gotterbarn et al., 2017). With regards to values, all three approaches of
user-centred design, user-experience design, and values-sensitive design
tackle more than typical software qualities, but they are still far from
addressing core human values (Alidoosti et al., 2022b). Value-driven methods,
known in HCI and information systems, can be used in business analysis and
requirements engineering, but they offer little guidance for the later stages
of development. Some emerging works take a human-values view (e.g., (Burnett
et al., 2016) used to discover gender bias in software; or (Alidoosti et al.,
2022a) incorporating ethical values in software design), but more is still
required to address human values systematically. The good news is that
software development methods could be adapted to handle human values. For
example, the Karlskrona Manifesto on Sustainability Design (Becker et al.,
2015a), or participatory design techniques can be taught to ensure that end-
user values are taken into account.

#### Systems thinking

Systems thinking is a term used to describe several knowledge traditions that
seek to understand the underlying, general mechanisms of how the world works
and how to understand the dynamics and principles necessary to grasp those
systems (Ramage and Shipp, 2020). Some contemporary forms of systems thinking
traditions, such as cybernetics, general systems theory, chaos theory, and
system dynamics invite thinking about social and ecological systems in terms
of drivers and dynamics that are common to many systems but need to be
understood as phenomena on their own terms. Based on those traditions, systems
thinking becomes a new lens, a new orienting principle for understanding the
world and pathways of change in it (Linnér and Wibeck, 2021).

Other forms of systems thinking such as Soft Systems methods and Critical
System Heuristics rather call into question the frames of reasoning and
rationale for delimiting, for example, problem scopes, relevance of knowledge
claims, success metrics and justifications (Ulrich and Reynolds, 2010). Based
on those traditions, systems thinking becomes a tool for critically reviewing
the requirements of systems and finding better boundaries when making
judgements in reasoning about systems (Duboc et al., 2020b).

Systems thinking can also be seen as a means of becoming able to care for the
wider ecosphere and humanity as a part of it, and to make design decisions
based on understanding the implications of such interconnectedness. Here,
systems thinkers such as Bateson (Gregory, 1979) have a great deal in common
with indigenous scholars such as Kimmerer (Kimmerer, 2013) who argues that
thinking in terms of systems implies that we must be able to cultivate
reverence for the primacy of life, and foster an inner development of people
to see themselves as part of a greater system and wish to act in such a way as
to care for the conditions for thriving of human beings within a regenerating
web of life (Stålne and Greca, 2022). Based on such traditions, systems
thinking becomes a means to broaden the view of which types of competencies
are valuable to orient education towards and to explicitly include the inner
development of your capacity to be, care for, and act in, the complex adaptive
systems of life.

Several of the interviewed organisations recognised the importance of systems
thinking, emphasising the need for a holistic view of factors and interactions
that could contribute to a better possible outcome (Heldal et al., 2024). This
awareness presents an opportunity for educators, to integrate systems thinking
into computing education. By adopting this approach, educators can lay the
groundwork for fostering more just and sustainable futures in computing,
moving away from current paradigms that may hinder progress in addressing
societal challenges (Becker, 2023). In doing so, computing needs to be re-
situated as a practice that seeks to redress problems in terms of those who
are primarily affected negatively by contemporary exploitative and destructive
practices (Becker, 2023).

#### Sustainability Impacts and Measurements

The role of metrics and other sustainability indicators are key to evaluating
to what extent an organisation or a particular sustainability initiative
achieve certain SDGs. Companies are adopting sustainable practices that have
to be measured with adequate indicators aimed to prove they meet the relevant
SDGs. While certain domains (e.g., energy or transportation) have well-
established indicators aimed at evaluating the sustainability of a solution,
others do not. Consequently, many organisations have difficulties assessing
sustainability and they need to define appropriate indicators. Existing
approaches to assess sustainability include techniques and tools such as the
SDG impact assessment tool (Chalmers, 2019), the SAF sustainability assessment
toolkit (Lago and Condori-Fernandez, 2022; Lago, 2019), and frameworks such as
SuSAF (Duboc et al., 2020a). In addition, public and private universities are
being increasingly ranked according to sustainability indicators (e.g. Times
Higher Education Impact Rankings), based on a set of predefined
metrics333https://www.timeshighereducation.com/impactrankings.

From our analysis of the companies, we found six organisations highlighted the
lack of metrics to understand the direct impacts of the product/system
adopting sustainable solutions, while another company observed there is a lack
of awareness on whether the solutions adopted are sustainable enough, partly
because of lack of metrics. These and other technical challenges aimed at
calculating the carbon or energy footprint of sustainable solutions are one of
the reasons to demand specific training on well-defined KPIs that can justify
their achievement of a certain level of sustainability. Nevertheless, many
companies today (e.g. Google, Microsoft, CGI) rely on public sustainability
reports where they deliver a set of sustainability indicators achieved by
their products. However, while many of these indicators concern energy savings
(energy indicators being popular nowadays), it is unclear to what extent the
metrics used by each company are standardised. Therefore, organisations
providing sustainability indicators need to make public how these metrics and
other sustainability indicators have been computed. For instance, Google
offers a carbon footprint calculator444https://cloud.google.com/carbon-
footprint?hl=en. Nevertheless, it is important to note that monitoring the
sustainability impact of software systems requires a suitable dataset with
sufficient quality. How to collect the right data and collect the data
sustainably remains to be a challenge to be addressed. For example, while
collecting marine data is expensive (Nguyen et al., 2023), many organisations
have repeatedly collected the data already obtained by others due to the
fragmented data sharing systems within the domain (Lima et al., 2022). The
environmental cost of operating computing platforms to handle the data is an
important metric to monitor (Kumar and Buyya, 2012).

Consequently, the use and adoption of existing sustainability metrics in
various domains (e.g. climate change measures) and sustainability dimensions
(e.g. technical and environmental) brings new opportunities for students to be
taught on those metrics and rankings and these topics should be included in CS
studies. The sustainability assessment toolkit (SAF) (Lago and Condori-
Fernandez, 2022) is one of the examples that can be used to evaluate
sustainability-related requirements. Toolkits like this can be used to train
CS students in the evaluation of sustainability concerns.

#### Technical sustainability

While there is no consensus within the field of software engineering as to how
sustainability should be defined or understood, technical sustainability can
generally be defined as the capacity of the software system to endure in
changing environments (Becker et al., 2015b; Venters et al., 2018). Emerging
views have evolved to argue that technically sustainable software is that
which is ”explicitly designed for continuous maintainability and evolvability
without incurring prohibitive technical debt and a negative impact on the
dimensions of sustainability” (Venters et al., 2023). The results from our
analysis of industry needs, confirm that for the technical dimension, the
interviewees viewed sustainability in relation to quality attributes of IT
products and services, such as reusability, robustness, security, etc (Heldal
et al., 2024). This strongly aligns with previous studies investigating how
software engineering professionals understand sustainability, highlighting
traditional software quality concerns such as maintainability and
extensibility (Chitchyan et al., 2016; Groher and Weinreich, 2017).

From our analysis, we identified several fundamental software engineering
skills and competencies that are missing from companies including the
application of software architecture in the design of sustainable software
systems, and an understanding of and the application of software metrics to
evaluate technical sustainability in a range of diverse application domains
(Heldal et al., 2024). It has long been argued that software architectures are
fundamental to the development of technically sustainable, i.e., long-living,
software systems, as they are the primary carrier of architecturally
significant requirements (ASRs) and influence how developers are able to
understand, analyse, test, and evolve a software systems (Lilienthal, 2019).

Software metrics provide a quantifiable measurement of software
characteristics. While there is a large number of metrics to track software
development to evaluate software quality and to certify software products,
there is still a lack of information and understanding on how to choose the
most suitable metrics in a particular context to evaluate technical
sustainability (Seacord et al., 2003). Understanding which software metrics
contribute to software quality assessment and how to automatically integrate
them into a software development pipeline is critical. For example, Org. 18
mentions they use some metrics, but they lack automatic processes to evaluate
the quality of their software systems. Understanding how to design software
architectures and apply software metrics can help to produce more software
systems that are technically sustainable (Venters et al., 2023).

Despite a range of software engineering methodologies and methods — waterfall,
iterative waterfall, spiral, v-model, rational unified process, rapid
application development, test-driven development, object orientation, DevOps,
extreme etc. — that have emerged over the last fifty years, it is argued that
the field of software engineering has still not fully understood how to
successfully construct successful software systems on a repeatable basis that
does not result in software projects being significantly over time and budget
or failing as a result of their size and complexity (Jacobson, 2018; Gharbi et
al., 2019). As a result, what remains is the need to align these perspectives
with a core set of software engineering skills and competencies that enable
quantifiable improvements in code and architectural design, and software
comprehension, and maximise its reuse, leading to standardised software
development practices and sustainable software systems. There is still a weak
connection that proves that many of the existing metrics can be used to
quantify technical sustainability, and this gap must be included in CS courses
to guide students about selecting the most suitable metrics or a combination
of them that can be chosen to measure sustainability concerns.

#### Soft skills

Soft skills are a term used to describe various generic skills or competencies
that could be used in a variety of job contexts as opposed to hard skills that
are linked with the technical expertise needed for the work (Olmstead et al.,
1974). Marin-Zapata et al. (Marin-Zapata et al., 2022) studied the
conceptualisation of soft skills in the literature and suggests, based on
approaches found from the literature, that soft skills have two main
components: intrapersonal and interpersonal. While the soft skills research
initially focused on interpersonal skills, i.e., people and social skills,
like communication and leadership, the recent research emphasises also the
ability to manage oneself, i.e., intrapersonal skills. Marin-Zapata et al.
(Marin-Zapata et al., 2022) present examples of soft skills focusing on these
two main components but does not provide a comprehensive categorisation of
various soft skills.

From our analysis of company needs, we identified several skills that either
exist in or are missing from a company. We divided these skills into
profession-specific hard skills, soft skills, and sustainability-specific
skills. Categorising the findings of the soft skills as interpersonal and
intrapersonal skills reveals that companies both have and need more
intrapersonal skills. Personal qualities like common sense, critical
reflection, and problem-solving skills, as well as values and ethics,
confidence and ways of working, and stress management, are valued by the
companies. The identified interpersonal skills include Collaboration,
Communication, Leadership, and Influencing skills, amongst others.

Although the importance of soft skills is increasingly recognised in computing
degrees, educators often struggle to fit the topic properly into their
classes. This difficulty may arise for several reasons. Sometimes, computing
teachers do not have the right knowledge and tools to teach soft skills to
students effectively. On other occasions, they may feel that the time they
have to cover the technical curricula is already too short, resulting in a
weak integration of soft skills into their teaching (e.g. without giving the
students the required time to reflect on and practice their soft skills).
Designers of computing programs should collaborate with other courses where
soft skills play a more critical role, such as management, leadership, and
social psychology, to find more effective ways to integrate them into the
curricula. A complementary activity could be to invite experts from industry
to teach soft skills to ICT students, giving students more practical
perspectives while strengthening relationships between academia and industry.

#### Building the business case for sustainability

Sustainability and the SDGs provide enormous business opportunities for
organisations (Oppenheim et al., 2017). As one organisation in the interview
study stated quite frankly “Why we are so interested? […] it’s money.” In the
mid-to-long term, companies can benefit from creating new systems to exploit
these business opportunities.

Therefore, IT professionals need to understand better what drives the
businesses they work for, the opportunities that focus on sustainability open
to businesses in general and to IT products and services in particular, and
the threats faced by businesses and IT products causing harm to the
environment and society. Understanding this might help them champion the idea
of sustainability internally and justify it in terms of economic,
environmental, and societal reasons. There exist a few methods and tools in
Software Engineering to support building a business case, e.g. BeSusAF
(Lammert, 2024) and S-BGQM (Oyedeji et al., 2017). In interviews with software
practitioners, it has been argued that this is anyway not the core of a
Software Engineer’s work (building a business case) (Betz et al., 2022).
However, a bridge between business cases, IT products and services, and
sustainability impacts is needed to anticipate opportunities and threats for
business, society, and the environment.

This situation provides many opportunities for educators. For example,
providing workshops on sustainability impacts for software engineers or
developing example cases on sustainability impacts. Moreover, traditional
practice-based courses such as capstones and hackathons could use these real-
world challenges companies have and, as an outcome, provide possible solutions
for companies to build business cases and minimise negative sustainability
effects. In general, educators may collaborate with companies to increase
practitioners’ awareness of the possible sustainability impacts of their
products and activities.

#### Legal Requirements and Standards

One of the pressures moving industry towards improved sustainability is the
need to comply with legal requirements and adopt standards. In many
jurisdictions, sustainability-related laws and regulations are becoming
stricter and the penalties for non-compliance are increasing (Rajamani and
Peel, 2021). IT professionals need to be aware of how these may affect system
requirements and how they may have an impact on business cases. Legal
requirements may, for example, include carbon taxes, customer data privacy,
mandatory sustainability reporting, Waste Electrical and Electronic Equipment
(WEEE) disposal, and Environmental Impact Assessment for Data Centre
construction proposals. The need to comply with these may have a direct impact
on the requirements of a project. For example, Org. 14 reported that “we’ve
been working with our customers and see how EU regulations have evolved”.
There is, in addition, a wide range of standards where compliance is not
required by law but may be expected by customers and other stakeholders. For
example, an increasing number of large businesses are requiring their
suppliers to provide carbon footprint data (Scope 3 reporting) (Greenhouse Gas
Protocol, 2015) and many investors are expecting voluntary sustainability
reporting complying with the Global Reporting Initiative or Sustainability
Accounting Standards Board (Pizzi et al., 2023) Businesses can differentiate
themselves in the marketplace by achieving certification to standards such as
ISO14001 for Environmental Management Systems (British Standards Institute,
2015). Some businesses may choose to change their legal foundation to benefit
a wider range of stakeholders than just shareholders e.g. B Corps (B Lab,
2018). ICT professionals need education on the systematic impacts of such
standards compliance and choices.

#### Advocacy and lobbying

This topic raises the question of how impartial and neutral researchers and
educators should be versus how much they are involved in advocacy and
lobbying. We are in favour of taking an informed and principled stance while
allowing discussion space for all perspectives on an issue. Some
sustainability topics are grounded in established science, e.g. Climate
Science (Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, 2022), and others are more
determined by contestable, normative values, e.g. acceptable levels of
inequality in society. Educators need to be explicit about their values and
positionality. One should not wait for regulation to start acting on
sustainability. Regulation is often a late follower of social trends and is
highly influenced by them. Recent decades have witnessed a range of social and
business movements towards sustainability, such as Corporate Social
Responsibility, Fairtrade, Slow Food, UN Global Compact, Natural Capitalism,
B-Corporations, etc. By contrast, technology often advances much faster and IT
professionals may not adequately anticipate the sustainability impacts
(Chatfield et al., 2017).

The importance of offering expertise to policymakers was highlighted by Org.
9: “a lot of policymakers don’t have a clue on digitalisation matters, and
because of that, they don’t know what they’re doing while writing the law.”.
The IT professional bodies do engage in policy formation e.g. ACM, BCS, and
educators can play a role in promoting and shaping movements such as the above
(Association for Computing Machinery, 2024). Universities should train future
IT professionals to combine their technical and sustainability expertise to
become strong advocates for sustainability. Therefore, curricula should also
include tools for effective and positive advocacy in organisations, media and
legislation, as well as lobbying.

##  4\. Under the Lens of our Sustainability in Computing Education Survey

As we critically reviewed the proposed topics we extracted from the interview
material and the outcome of the literature review on sustainability in
computing education (Peters et al., 2024), many of the same conclusions on
computing education and open questions hold when reviewing what industry
representatives argue. We offer similar questions as a result of the interview
studies, and some tentative suggestions for ways of moving forward.

In the following, we provide a concise overview of our findings for each
topic.

The conceptualisations of sustainability were divergent and incoherent, both
among the interviewees, but especially when contrasted with understandings of
drivers of our current crises and inabilities to enact changes through
research and education (Stoddard et al., 2021). The call for core
sustainability concepts could be contrasted with the recommendation to make
meaningful and substantive changes calibrated against drivers of our
predicaments, and core topics related to equality, justice and power relations
(Peters et al., 2024, Sec. 7.1.2). However, the interviews presented a limited
view of some of the symptoms of our interlinked crises, notably carbon
emissions and climate change. As an open question, therefore, we ask how we
may best move conversations forward to ensure a broader and more meaningful
framing of topics needed, with industry professionals and educators alike.

In the literature review on computing education, recommendations for working
with values and ethics address justice-centred computing education and methods
for broader engagement with stakeholders marginalised or negatively affected
by IT systems. As values thinking requires activities and explorations of the
motivations and actions of learners themselves, and in contexts where they
encounter stakeholders with different perspectives (Wiek et al., 2015),
including values thinking might lead to disruptive types of learning if we
allow students to explore values behind systems and question the underlying
rationale for project proposals of IT systems in their capstone projects
(Duboc et al., 2020a). For such disruptions to be possible and productive,
they would have to not only include denouncing prevailing systems or practices
but also open up pathways towards other forms of engaging with IT design. An
open question here would be how to combine such critical approaches with
systems design courses in a respectful and empathetic manner to gain broader
acceptance for the need to critically review assumptions when designing IT
systems.

Systems thinking requires a shift in frame and attention that would reposition
reductionist computational thinking as subordinate to a systems perspective on
how norms and power relations shape how we understand system boundaries and
values of worth in IT design (Peters et al., 2024, Sec. 7.1.2). An open
question here would be how to empower educators and professionals trained in
computational thinking to shift perspectives towards holistic, inclusive and
critical analyses of systems, and how to include self-awareness in relation to
limitations of knowledge.

Sustainability impacts and measurements are complementary, and at first glance
perhaps seemingly opposed, to the holistic view brought about by systems
thinking. An open question is whether a hands-on approach that delivers hard
facts and measures progress is as important as a broad understanding of the
intricate and complex reality. It might also have the benefit of motivating
technically inclined students to embark on the journey and be more open to the
systems thinking paradigm if they can also measure some parts of it.

Understanding conditions for technical sustainability was called for as an
important competence in the interviews. On the one hand, this is a
recommendation aligned with what the literature review on education called
for, by e.g. combining architecture assessment methods with longevity and
broader concerns (Peters et al., 2024, Sec. 7.1.3), but on the other, the
longevity of a particular system might not be in the long-term interest of the
social and ecological systems of which it is part. The literature review calls
for caution, by saying that while “understanding technical underpinnings and
development trajectories of computing are relevant, reproducing or continuing
on them might not be” (Peters et al., 2024, Section 8). An open question
therefore might be to best combine competencies to promote the longevity of
designs, and the dispositions and abilities necessary to dismantle systems
that are not in our long-term interest to maintain.

Soft skills are an integral part of what the interviews call for and could be
interpreted as what the literature review concludes as important. However, the
literature review does not use this particular term in recommendations for
changes in curricula and the term has been criticised as pushing human-centred
concerns outside of the purview of technical education, introducing an
artificial distinction that makes it harder to see that all technology has
social implications and is embedded in a social fabric of values (Berdanier,
2022). What the computing education literature review calls for instead is an
explicit connection to research on norms, values, equality, justice and power,
and to empower computing students to internalise stakeholders traditionally
considered peripheral to design work. The types of skills necessary for wider
stakeholder engagement may require methods of teaching and assessment that are
currently some steps removed from the traditional types of teaching in
computing. Training in empathetic communication, and having the ability to
refrain from building destructive systems may challenge current notions of
valid approaches to computing education. An open question then becomes how to
provide training for computing educators, students and industry professionals
alike, to make them comfortable to include notions of wider stakeholder
dialogues, future thinking and empathetic listening to understand the social
fabrics of which we are part.

Building the business case for sustainability is another topic not covered in
the current computing education framework. Despite the perceived conflict
between business interests and sustainability, industry stakeholders recognise
potential business opportunities. Hence, we view this as an overlooked area
that academia should explore further. Enhancing understanding of the business
case for sustainability among students can help bridge this gap, and perhaps
be added as a learning objective and possibly in the intersection between
computing- and sustainability-specific topics.

For this to work, however, it is necessary to adopt a wide-boundary
understanding of both symptoms and drivers of our current predicaments, and an
open question remains about how to formulate general business responses that
would be compatible with both short-term and long-term societal needs in light
of them.

Legal requirements and standards are a core concern of businesses that might
be too little acknowledged by academia (at least outside core fields such as
management, although requirements engineering discusses legal issues and
software quality courses discuss standards); in SWEBOK, for example, it is
limited to one subtopic under the topic professionalism (Bourque and Fairley,
2014, 1.7 Legal Issues). Situating computing projects within the realm of real
legal frameworks and requiring student projects to take legal implications
seriously would probably help students understand the contexts in which
industries operate. However, such legal frameworks on the one hand mandate
better electronic waste management, but are still ineffective as they do not
address the issues of design that make electronic equipment intrinsically hard
to recycle (Shahabuddin et al., 2023). Legislation may even be
counterproductive and mandate a maximisation of shareholder value at the
expense of the values of others, or require public procurement at the lowest
cost if no quantifiable attributes can separate a conscientious and a careless
actor. An open question, therefore, would remain about how best to combine
awareness of existing legal frameworks with a willingness to engage in
sustainability and whether or not such work is supported by existing
frameworks.

Concerning advocacy and lobbying, as we imagine it, it goes far beyond simple
awareness raising. As argued in (Peters et al., 2024), we acknowledge that
part of the scientific community feels the need for stronger lobbying on
behalf of sustainability, and believe this to be also necessary (Gardner et
al., 2021). If academia and business could align their efforts, such as by
integrating business case studies and legal considerations into academic
curricula, it would likely reduce resistance and opposition from influential
industry stakeholders. This alignment may even foster cooperation and support
towards achieving shared objectives. An open question that remains here is how
such activism can be directed to calling for change within the business and
education sectors themselves, and how to ensure that such activism can be
taken seriously as benign, productive and empathetic but still firmly grounded
in critical understanding of where we are and where we need to be.

##  5\. Conclusions

This paper analysed a set of sustainability-related topics as elicited from an
interview study with computing professionals. The analysis is based on (i) our
understanding of the results of interviews with IT professionals (Heldal et
al., 2024), (ii) our own expertise as researchers and educators engaged in
teaching sustainability, and (iii) a comparison of those results to the
recommendations from a recent literature review of sustainability in computing
education (Peters et al., 2024). In particular, we provide open questions
given how IT professionals reason and what the literature review called for.

As we stated in (Heldal et al., 2024), industry demands experts or engineers
trained in specific sustainability topics. These demands combined with the
recommendations based on the state of computing education (Peters et al.,
2024), call for several shifts in the perception of how to reorient computing,
such as we outlined in Section 4.

Therefore, efforts are needed to change the status quo and propose a roadmap
to incorporate sustainability learning objectives and courses in the computing
education curricula. Here, computing educators and industry professionals may
themselves be able to use a systems lens to understand which barriers to
change exist, and how to employ leverage points for successful change in
higher education in light of them (Blanco-Portela et al., 2017; Leifler and
Dahlin, 2020).

For instance, learning about both key competencies and learning activities
conducive to promoting them (Lozano et al., 2017; United Nations Educational,
Scientific, and Cultural Organization, 2017) and applying strategies for
change agents in higher education (Moore, 2005) would be necessary parts for a
wider change process among computing educators.

Also, by openly asking the questions we pose in Section 4 to critical friends
of computing as suggested in (Becker, 2023), and inviting them to help us
define what computing should be in light of urgent needs for a new direction,
computing can be a key leverage point towards just and sustainable futures
(Creutzig et al., 2022). With these changes, we hope that education will be
able to “orient itself more toward emancipation, based on care,
experimentation, critical thinking, and reflection” (Peters et al., 2024).

The agenda we foresee should align with European guidelines, such as the Green
Deal education initiative and the EU recommendation (2022) to stimulate
learning for the green transition and sustainable development.

###### Acknowledgements.

The authors would like to thank all the interviewees who took part in the
study, and also: NOVA LINCS (UIDB/04516/2020) with the financial support of
FCT.IP; SFI SmartOcean NFR Project 309612/F40, by KISS (16DHBKI061) with the
financial support of the Federal Ministry of Education and Research, Germany;
Catalan Government (Departament de Recerca i Universitats) for the grant 2021
SGR 01396 given to the HER group; VU Digital Sustainability Center (DiSC);
Chalmers Area of Advance ICT for Sustainability project 37460087.

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# Studies on $\tau$ decays at Belle II

L. Zani

###### Abstract

Tau leptons are powerful tools to probe physics beyond the Standard Model
(SM). The Belle II experiment is installed at the SuperKEKB asymmetric energy
electron-positron collider and aims at collecting the world’s largest sample
of tau pair events $e^{+}e^{-}\rightarrow\tau^{+}\tau^{-}$. Direct searches
for new invisible mediators, charged lepton flavor violation in $\tau$ decays,
and tests of the SM via precision measurements of $\tau$ lepton properties and
couplings are reported in the following article. The results presented here
are based on the data collected by Belle II during 2019-2021.

##  1 Introduction

As the only leptons massive enough to decay into hadrons, taus not only allow
to investigate the hadronization mechanism via their hadronic final states,
but might preferentially couple to non-SM physics, through mass-dependent
couplings. Therefore, any possible contribution from a new mediator whose
coupling is proportional to lepton masses might be enhanced. From the
experimental point of view though, taus are challenging since they can not be
detected as long-lived particles, but must instead be reconstructed from their
final-state products, which involve undetectable neutrinos. Furthermore, they
allow searching for charged lepton flavor violation (LFV), which would provide
an indisputable proof for beyond SM physics. Processes involving LFV can occur
in the SM via weak interaction charged currents, due to neutrino oscillations,
and are predicted at the level of 10-50, which is beyond the reach of current
and future experiments. Belle II has a unique capability to probe both new
invisible mediators and LFV in $\tau$ decays. Moreover, it can look for
indirect signs of non-SM physics through high precision measurements of SM
fundamental parameters. We report searches for new invisible particles, $\tau$
LFV decays and the measurement of the $\tau$ lepton mass using the data
collected by the Belle II detector [1] at the SuperKEKB asymmetric energy
$e^{+}e^{-}$ collider. SuperKEKB mainly operates at a centre-of-mass energy
(c.m.) of 10.58 GeV and adopts a nano-beam scheme to reach unprecedented
instantaneous luminosity. At the time of this conference, the accelerator has
achieved the peak luminosity world record of 4.7$\times 10^{34}$ cm${}^{-2}/s$
and Belle II has so far collected 424 fb-1 of data, including unique energy
scan samples. It is currently in its first long shutdown.

##  2 Leptons as discovery tools: the experimental challenges

Leptonic production of tau pair processes
$e^{+}e^{-}\rightarrow\tau^{+}\tau^{-}$ provide a very clean physics
environment and can rely on precise QED predictions to look for physics beyond
the SM. The way is two-fold: one could look for deviations from SM predictions
in high precision measurements of very clean and precisely computed
observables; a second possibility is instead to search for processes that
would be either forbidden or highly suppressed in the SM and whose observation
is per se a hint of new physics. The first class of measurements are mainly
systematically limited and to improve the current results and attain the
world’s best precision, an excellent understanding of the experiment
performance at the fraction of permille level is required. On the other hand,
measurements of rare or forbidden processes imply to achieve unprecedented
luminosity to collect sufficiently large data sets and devise new analysis
techniques to boost signal efficiencies in order to reach sensitivities below
the $10^{-8}$ level.

##  3 Experimental facility: Belle II

The Belle II detector, the main upgrade of its predecessor Belle, is a
multipurpose spectrometer surrounding the $e^{+}e^{-}$ interaction point and
providing coverage of more than 90% of the solid angle. The details of the
Belle II detector can be found elsewhere [1]. Belle II ensures a very high
reconstruction efficiency for neutral particles and excellent resolutions
despite the harsh beam background environment, both of which are crucial when
dealing with recoiling system and missing-energy final states. Additionally,
it is equipped with dedicated low-multiplicty trigger lines at hardware level,
mainly based on calorimetric information, which were not available at Belle.
Profiting from the well known initial state of $e^{+}e^{-}$ collisions, and
its near-hermetic coverage, Belle II has a unique capability to probe
signatures involving invisible final states and particles escaping detection.
Moreover, the production cross-section for
$e^{+}e^{-}\rightarrow\tau^{+}\tau^{-}$ events is 0.919 nb at a c.m. energy
$\sqrt{s}=10.58$ GeV, allowing Belle II to collect large data samples for
precision measurements of $\tau$ lepton properties.

###  3.1 Typical $\tau$ signatures in $e^{+}e^{-}$ collisions

In $e^{+}e^{-}\rightarrow\tau^{+}\tau^{-}$ processes, tau candidates are
produced back-to-back in c.m. system. Their decay products are well separated
into two opposite hemispheres, defined by the plane perpendicular to the
thrust axis $\mathbf{\hat{n}}_{T}$, which is the vector maximizing the
quantity

$T=\max_{\mathbf{\hat{n}}_{T}}\left(\dfrac{\sum_{i}\left|\mathbf{p}_{i}\cdot\mathbf{\hat{n}}_{T}\right|}{\sum_{i}\left|\mathbf{p}_{i}\right|}\right),$
(3.1)

where $\mathbf{p}_{i}$ is the momentum of the final state particle $i$,
including both charged and neutral particles. According to the number of
charged particles in each hemisphere, consistently with charge conservation in
$\tau$ decays, two main topologies can be selected: the $3\times 1$-prong
decays, with three charged particles on one side and only one in the opposite
hemisphere; or the $1\times 1$-prong decays.

Figure 1: On the left, the distribution of the normalized lepton energy
$x_{\ell}$ for the electron (top) and muon (bottom) channel in the search for
$\tau\to\ell\alpha$ is shown. Data are the black dots and the simulation is
the stack filled histograms. On the right, upper limits at 95% C.L. on the
branching-fraction ratios $\mathcal{B}(\tau\rightarrow
e\alpha)/\mathcal{B}(\tau\to e\nu\bar{\nu})$ (top) and
$\mathcal{B}(\tau\to\mu\alpha)/\mathcal{B}(\tau\to\mu\nu\bar{\nu})$ (bottom)
as a function of the $\alpha$ mass, as well as their expectations from
background-only hypothesis.

Requiring the reconstructed tracks to match one of these topology classes is a
powerful way to suppress the main background from continuum
$e^{+}e^{-}\rightarrow q\bar{q}$ processes and enhance signal purity when
reconstructing $e^{+}e^{-}\rightarrow\tau^{+}\tau^{-}$ events.

##  4 Searches for a new invisible boson $\alpha$ in $\tau$ decays

Decays of $\tau$ leptons to new LFV bosons are postulated in many models [2].
The process searched for in this study is
$e^{+}e^{-}\rightarrow\tau^{+}(\to\ell\alpha)\tau^{-}(\to\pi^{+}\pi^{-}\pi^{-}\nu)$
and its charge conjugated. The signal $\tau$ is searched for in its decay to a
new invisible boson $\alpha$, accompanied by a lepton $\ell=e,\mu$, therefore
$3\times 1$-prong events are selected. The signal $\tau$ rest-frame is
approximated using as energy half the collision energy $\sqrt{s}/2$ and as
momentum direction the opposite to the one of the reconstructed tag $\tau$. We
exploit the kinematic features of the signal process as a two-body decay to
discriminate it from the background, by looking for a narrow peak in the
distribution of the normalized lepton energy in the c.m. frame (Figure 1, left
plot) over a smooth contribution coming from the irreducible background of
$\tau\to\ell\nu\bar{\nu_{\ell}}$ processes. In absence of any signal excess in
63 fb-1data, 95% CL upper limits in the mass range between 0 and 1.6
GeV/$c^{2}$ are computed on the ratio of branching fractions
$\mathcal{B}(\tau\to\ell\alpha)$ normalized to
$\mathcal{B}(\tau\to\ell\nu\bar{\nu_{\ell}})$ [3]. This analysis provides
limits (Figure 1, right plots) between 2-14 times more stringent than the
previous one set by ARGUS [4].

##  5 Direct searches for LFV $\tau\to\ell\phi$ decays

Possible new mediators may enhance the branching fraction for $\tau$ LFV
decays $\tau^{-}\rightarrow\ell^{-}\phi$ up to observable levels of $\sim
10^{-8}$, and accommodate for flavor anomalies observed in lepton flavor
universality tests with $B$ decays [5]. In contrast to previous searches for
$\tau^{-}\rightarrow\ell^{-}\phi$ decays performed at Belle [6] on
$e^{+}e^{-}\rightarrow\tau^{+}\tau^{-}$ events, we apply for the first time an
untagged approach. Only the signal $\tau$ decay to a $\phi$ meson candidate
and a lepton, either muon or electron, is explicitly reconstructed and the
other $\tau$ is not required to decay to any specific known final state. Event
kinematics features and signal properties are used in a BDT classifier to
suppress the background, with twice the signal efficiency for the muon mode
with respect to previous analyses. Yields are extracted with a Poisson
counting experiment approach from windows peaking at the known $\tau$ mass and
at zero in the 2D plane of $(M_{\tau},\Delta E_{\tau})$, respectively, where
$\Delta E_{\tau}$ is the difference between the reconstructed energy of the
signal $\tau$ in the c.m. frame and half the collision energy. We find no
significant excess and set 90% CL upper limits on the branching fractions of
$\mathcal{B}_{\mathrm{UL}}(\tau\to e\phi)=23\times 10^{-8}$ and
$\mathcal{B}_{\mathrm{UL}}(\tau\to\mu\phi)=9.7\times 10^{-8}$ [7].

##  6 Measurement of the $\tau$ lepton mass

Lepton properties are fundamental parameters of the SM and need to be measured
with the highest precision. By applying the pseudo-mass $M_{min}$ technique to
reconstructed $e^{+}e^{-}\rightarrow\tau^{+}\tau^{-}$ events from 190 fb-1
data, we provide the world’s most precise measurement of the $\tau$ mass
$M_{\tau}$. The measured value is extracted from a fit to the endpoint of the
distribution
$M_{min}=\sqrt{M_{3\pi}^{2}+2(\sqrt{s}/2-E^{*}_{3\pi})(E^{*}_{3\pi}-P^{*}_{3\pi})}$,
which is computed from events where the signal $\tau$ is reconstructed in its
decays to three charged pions and the other $\tau$ decaying into one charged
particle. The distributions of the pseudomass in simulation and data is shown
in the left plot of Figure 2. An excellent control of the systematic sources,
dominated by the calibration of the beam energies and the charged-particle
momentum scale, is required to reduce the total systematic uncertainty to 0.11
MeV/$c^{2}$, achieving the most precise measurement to date of the $\tau$
lepton mass of $1777.09\pm 0.08_{\mathrm{stat}}\pm 0.11_{\mathrm{sys}}$ [8].

Figure 2: On the left, the spectrum of the reconstructed pseudomass in data
(black dots) and the superimposed fit (solid blue line) are shown. The bottom
inset plot displays differences between data and fit result divided by the
statistical uncertainties. On the right, the most precise measurements of the
tau mass to date, compared to the world average (gray band) and this work
result (blue text).

##  7 Prospects on lepton flavor universality tests

Lepton flavor universality (LFU) in SM assumes all three leptons have equal
coupling strength to the charged gauge bosons of the electroweak interaction.
Many models predict new forces violating LFU [9]. Tau decays allow high
precision tests of LFU by measuring the ratio of the branching fractions of
$\tau$ decays to muon and to electron,

$\centering
R_{\mu}=\frac{\mathcal{B}(\tau\to\mu\nu_{\mu}\nu_{\tau})}{\mathcal{B}(\tau\to
e\nu_{e}\nu_{\tau})}\@add@centering$ (7.1)

The most precise result to date is $R_{\mu}=0.9796\pm
0.0016_{\mathrm{stat}}\pm 0.0036_{\mathrm{sys}}$ provided by Babar [10]. It
uses 467 fb-1 collision data, for a final 0.4% precision, systematically
dominated by the contribution of the particle identification (PID) and trigger
uncertainties. Simulation studies at Belle II show room for several
improvements: by devising dedicated low multiplicity triggers based on
calorimeter information, which provide a better understanding of the kinematic
dependency and reduce the associated systematic uncertainty; by dropping the
likelihood-based PID selector for pions and deploying BDT classifier for
lepton identification, which will decrease the probability to wrongly identify
a pion as a lepton to less than 0.1%; eventually, adding the $1\times 1$-prong
decays as signal signature to increase the size of the analyzed data set.
Further studies for the development of the specific 1x1 topology triggers are
still needed, but already with one quarter of Babar data set, Belle II
expected sensitivity achieves the same statistical precision of 0.16%.

## References

  * [1] T. Abe and et al., _Belle II Technical Design Report_ , 2010.
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  * [3] Belle II collaboration, _Search for Lepton-Flavor-Violating $\tau$ Decays to a Lepton and an Invisible Boson at Belle II_, _Phys. Rev. Lett._ 130 (2023) 181803.
  * [4] ARGUS collaboration, _A Search for lepton flavor violating decays $\tau\to e\alpha$, $\tau\to\mu\alpha$_, _Z. Phys. C_ 68 (1995) 25.
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  * [7] Belle II collaboration, _Search for lepton-flavor-violating $\tau^{-}\to\ell^{-}\phi$ decays in 2019-2021 Belle II data_, 2305.04759.
  * [8] Belle II collaboration, _Measurement of the $\tau$-lepton mass with the Belle~II experiment_, 2305.19116.
  * [9] A. Crivellin, F. Kirk, C.A. Manzari and L. Panizzi, _Searching for lepton flavor universality violation and collider signals from a singly charged scalar singlet_ , _Phys. Rev. D_ 103 (2021) 073002 [2012.09845].
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