A flavour-independent Higgs boson search in e+e- collisions at sqrt(s) up to 209GeV

Abstract

A search for the Higgsstrahlung process ${\rm e}^+{\rm e}^- \to {\rm HZ}$ is carried out, covering decays of the Higgs boson into any quark pair, a gluon pair or a tau pair. The analysis is based on the $630 {\rm pb}^{-1}$ of data collected by the ALEPH detector at LEP at centre-of-mass energies from 189 to 209 GeV. A 95% C.L. lower mass limit of 109.1\mc2 is obtained for a Higgs boson cross section equal to that expected from the Standard Model if the Higgs boson decays exclusively into hadrons and/or taus, irrespective of the relative branching fractions.