Searches for Charged Higgs Bosons at LEP

Abstract

The four LEP experiments Aleph, Delphi, L3 and Opal updated their searches for pair production of charged Higgs bosons using more than 210/pb luminosity collected per experiment in the year 2000. Combining it with previously collected data, a significant deviation from background (equivalent to 4.4 sigma) is found by the L3 collaboration for low values of the branching ratio H+/- -> tau nu around masses of about 68 GeV. This excess is however not seen by the other LEP collaborations and thus a lower limit on the charged Higgs mass is set at 78.5 GeV at 95% confidence level. All results reported here are still preliminary.

4 pages, 4 figures, LaTex, to be published in the Proceedings of XXXVIth Rencontre de Moriond, Electroweak Interactions and Unified Theories, March 2001