Speaker: Maria Cepeda Hermida, University of Wisconsin
Abstract: The CMS experiment at the LHC performed the first direct search for lepton violating decays of the recently discovered Higgs boson, to a muon-tau pair. These decays are forbidden in the standard model, but arise naturally in beyond the standard scenarios such as models with more than one Higgs doublet, composite Higgs models, Randall-Sundrum models, and many others. The search is performed in the h->mu tau_e and h->mu tau_had channels, where tau_had and tau_e are taus reconstructed in the hadronic and electronic decay channels, respectively. The data sample used in the search corresponds to an integrated luminosity of 19.7 fb-1 collected in pp collisions at 8 TeV. The sensitivity of the search is an order of magnitude better than the existing indirect limits. A slightly excess of data with a significance of 2.5 sigma is observed. This results constrain the branching ratio of h->mu tau to < 1.57% at 95% CL. This branching ratio limit is then used to constrain the Y(mu tau) Yukawa couplings.