Search for lepton-flavor-violating tau decays to $\ell\alpha$ at Belle

Abstract

We report a search for the lepton-flavor-violating decays $\tau^{\pm}\to\ell^{\pm}\alpha$~($\ell=e,\mu$), where $\alpha$ is an undetected spin-0 particle, such as an axion-like particle using $736\times10^{6}$ tau lepton pairs collected by the Belle detector at the KEKB asymmetric-energy $e^{+}e^{-}$ collider. We find no evidence of signal and obtain the most stringent upper limits on the branching fractions at 95\% confidence level: $\mathcal{B}(\tau^{\pm}\rightarrow e^{\pm}\alpha)$ $<$ $(0.4$--$6.4)\times10^{-4}$ and $\mathcal{B}(\tau^{\pm}\rightarrow \mu^{\pm}\alpha)$ $<$ $(0.2$--$3.5)\times10^{-4}$ at 95\% confidence level for an $\alpha$ mass in the range $0.0\leq m_{\alpha}\leq 1.6$~GeV/$c^{2}$.