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

Abstract

A search is presented for a Higgs-like boson with mass in the range 45 to 195 $\mathrm{GeV}/c^2$ decaying into a muon and a tau lepton. The dataset consists of proton-proton interactions at a centre-of-mass energy of 8 $\mathrm{TeV}$ , collected by the LHCb experiment, corresponding to an integrated luminosity of 2 $\text{fb}{}^{-1}$ . 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 $\mathrm{pb}$ for a boson mass of 45 $\mathrm{GeV}/c^2$ to 4 $\mathrm{pb}$ for a mass of 195 $\mathrm{GeV}/c^2$ .