Search for lepton-flavor-violating tau decays to ℓα at Belle

A bstract We report a search for the lepton-flavor-violating decays τ ± → ℓ ± α ( ℓ = e , μ ), where α is an undetected spin-0 particle, such as an axion-like particle using 736 × 10 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: B ( τ ± → e ± α ) < (0.4–6.4) × 10 − 4 and B ( τ ± → μ ± α ) < (0.2–3.5) × 10 − 4 at 95% confidence level for an α mass in the range 0.0 ≤ m α ≤ 1.6 GeV/ c 2 .