Search for Lepton Flavor Violating Decays of the Higgs Boson in the Mu Tau Hadronic Channel

A search for the lepton flavor violating decay of the Higgs boson to a muon and a hadronically decaying tau lepton is presented. The search uses 19.7 fb\ extsuperscript{-1} of $\sqrt{s} = 8$ TeV proton-proton collision data collected by the Compact Muon Solenoid. Limits on the branching fraction are combined with those from a similar search with an electronically decaying tau to set a 95\% CL limit on $B(H \ o \mu \ au) < 1.51\%$. The branching fraction limit is transformed to a limit on Yukawa couplings $\sqrt{|Y_{\mu \ au}|^{2}+|Y_{\ au \mu}|^{2}} < 3.6 \ imes 10^{-3}$. These limits are an order of magnitude stronger than existing constraints set by indirect methods. A slight excess of signal events is observed in multiple categories with a combined significance of 2.4 $\sigma$ corresponding to a best fit branching fraction of $B(H \ o \mu \ au) = 0.84^{+0.39}_{-0.37}\%$.