CLEO Contributions to Tau Physics

Abstract

Introduction Over the last dozen years, the CLEO Collaboration has made use of data collected by the the CLEO-II detector [1] to measure many of the properties of the tau lepton and its neutrino. Now that the experiment is making a transition from operation in the 10 GeV (B factory) region to the 3-5 GeV tau-charm factory region [2], it seemed to the author and the Tau02 conference organizers to be a good time to review the contributions of the CLEO experiment to tau physics. We are consciously omitting results from CLEO-I (data taken before 1989). The author has chosen to take a semi-critical approach, emphasizing both the strengths and weaknesses of tau physics at CLEO: past, present, and future. 2. Tau Production at 10 GeV We begin by discussing a topic on which CLEO has not published: tau pair production. In e e collisions, one can study taus in production and/or decay. The production reaction is governed by wellunderstood QED. As such, it is not terribly interesti