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Tau decay physics

Results from SLC and LEP indicate that there are only three generations of leptons[55] within the standard gauge theory of electromagnetic and weak interactions[56]. The heaviest of these leptons, the , serves as an excellent laboratory for studying many aspects of the Standard Model[57]. Of all the known leptons only the is massive enough to decay into both purely leptonic states and semileptonic states with accompanying hadrons. The purely leptonic decays allow the study of lepton universality and the vertex, while the semileptonic decays permit the investigation of the weak hadronic current and strong interaction effects. The decay of the allows the measuring of the mass and the search for Standard Model forbidden decays involving three generations of leptons with or without accompanying hadrons.

To date all meaningful studies of the properties of the have been carried out at ee colliders. At these facilities the cross section for production is relatively large while the associated backgrounds are both calculable and small. These advantages suggest that ee colliders will be the place to measure the decay characteristics of the for many years to come. For CLEO III we assume an integrated luminosity of 30 fb for which there will be about 27 million pairs produced. In Table we list the data samples which will be available for various decays. In this section, we discuss a selected sample of physics topics that can be studied at an upgraded CESR/CLEO facility. We will assume that the one-charged-particle decay discrepancy has been resolved and thus will not be discussed here.



bebek@lns598.lns.cornell.edu