Search for Lepton Flavor Violating Decays $τ^\pm \to \ell^\pm{π^0}, \ell^\pmη, \ell^\pm{η^\prime}$

Abstract

A search for lepton flavor violating decays of the $τ$ lepton to a lighter mass lepton and a pseudoscalar meson has been performed using 339 fb$^{-1}$ of $e^+e^-$ annihilation data collected at a center-of-mass energy near 10.58 GeV by the BaBar detector at the SLAC PEP-II storage ring. No evidence of signal has been found, and upper limits on the branching fractions are set at $10^{-7}$ level.