Search for Lepton-Flavor Violation in the Decay tau -> lhh

Abstract

A search for the lepton-flavor-violating decay of the tau into one charged lepton and two charged hadrons has been performed using $221.4{\mathrm{fb}}^{-1}$ of data collected at an $e^{+}{e}^{-}$ center-of-mass energy around 10.58 GeV with the BABAR detector at the PEP-II storage ring. In all 14 decay modes considered, the numbers of events found in data are compatible with the background expectations. Upper limits on the branching fractions are set in the range $(0.7-4.8)\times 10^{-7}$ at 90% confidence level. All results are preliminary.

17 pages, 2 postscript figures, submitted to Tau04