Improved Limits on the Lepton-Flavor Violating Decays tau- --> l-l+l-

Understand

A search for the neutrinoless, lepton-flavor violating decay of the tau lepton into three charged leptons has been performed using 376 fb^{-1} of data collected at an e^+e^- center-of-mass energy around 10.58 GeV with the BaBar detector at the PEP-II storage rings.

• In all six decay modes considered, the numbers of events found in data are compatible with the background expectations.
• Upper limits on the branching fractions are set in the range (4-8) x 10^{-8} at 90% confidence level.