Search for lepton-flavour-violating decays of Higgs-like bosons

TL;DR

This paper reports a search for lepton-flavour-violating decays of a Higgs-like boson in proton-proton collisions, setting upper limits on production cross-section times branching fraction across a mass range of 45 to 195 GeV.

Contribution

It presents the first search for Higgs-like bosons decaying into muon and tau leptons in the specified mass range using LHCb data.

Findings

No significant signal observed.

Upper limits on cross-section times branching fraction established.

Limits vary from 22 pb to 4 pb depending on mass.

Abstract

A search is presented for a Higgs-like boson with mass in the range 45 to 195 GeV/$c^2$ decaying into a muon and a tau lepton. The dataset consists of proton-proton interactions at a centre-of-mass energy of 8 TeV, collected by the LHCb experiment, corresponding to an integrated luminosity of 2 fb$^{-1}$. The tau leptons are reconstructed in both leptonic and hadronic decay channels. An upper limit on the production cross-section multiplied by the branching fraction at 95% confidence level is set and ranges from 22 pb for a boson mass of 45 GeV/$c^2$ to 4 pb for a mass of 195 GeV/$c^2$.