Tau decays with neutral kaons

The branching ratio of the tau lepton to a neutral K meson is measured from a sample of approximately 200,000 tau decays recorded by the OPAL detector at centre-of-mass energies near the Z0 resonance. The measurement is based on two samples which identify one-prong tau decays with KL and KS mesons. The combined branching ratios are measured to be B(tau- -->pi- K0bar nutau) = (9.33+-0.68+-0.49)x10^-3 B(tau- -->pi- K0bar [>=1pi0] nutau) = (3.24+-0.74+-0.66)x10^-3 B(tau- -->K- K0bar [>=0pi0] nutau) = (3.30+-0.55+-0.39)x10^-3 where the first error is statistical and the second systematic.Comment: 21 pages, 6 figures, submitted to Eur. Phys. J.

A Study of B0(S) meson oscillation using hadronic Z0 decays containing leptons

A sample of Z decays containing b-flavoured hadrons is tagged using leptons, and events having precise proper time measurements are selected. These events are used to study Bs oscillations. using the lepton to tag the decay b-flavour and jet charge or a second lepton, where available, to determine the produced b-flavour. The flavour (b or b-bar) at decay is determined from the lepton charge while the flavour at production is determined from jet charge or the charge of a second lepton, where available. The experiment was not able to resolve the oscillatory behaviour, and we deduce that the Bs oscillation frequency Delta(ms)> 5.2ps-1 at the 95% confidence level.Comment: 28 pages, 10 figures, submitted to Euro. Phys. J.

Charged multiplicities in Z decays into u, d, and s quarks

About 4.4 million hadronic decays of Z bosons, recorded by the OPAL detector at LEP at a centre-of-mass energy of around sqrt(s) = 91.2 GeV, are used to determine the mean charged particle multiplicities for the three light quark flavours. Events from primary u, d, and s quarks are tagged by selecting characteristic particles which carry a large fraction of the beam energy. The charged particle multiplicities are measured in the hemispheres opposite to these particles. An unfolding procedure is applied to obtain these multiplicities for each primary light quark flavour. This yields = 17.77 +- 0.51 +0.86 -1.20, = 21.44 +- 0.63 +1.46 -1.17, = 20.02 +- 0.13 +0.39 -0.37, where statistical and systematic errors are given. The results for and are almost fully statistically anti-correlated. Within the errors the result is consistent with the flavour independence of the strong interaction for the particle multiplicities in events from the light up, down, and strange quarks.Comment: 24 pages, 3 figures, submitted to Eur. Phys. J.