Search for Lepton Flavour Violation in the Decay tau -> mu gamma

Abstract

A search for the lepton flavour violating decay tau -> mu gamma has been performed using 221.4/fb of data collected at an e+e- centre-of-mass energy of 10.58 GeV with the BABAR detector at the PEP-II storage ring. The search has an efficiency of (7.45+/-0.65)% for an expected background level of 6.2+/-0.5 events. In the final sample 4 candidate events are selected. As there is no evidence for a signal in this data, for this preliminary result we set an upper limit of BR(tau -> mu gamma) < 9 x 10^-8 at 90%CL using the method of Feldman and Cousins.