We report the results of a search for the rare, purely leptonic decay B- -> mu(-)(nu) over bar (mu) performed with a 711 fb(-1) data sample that contains 772 x 10(6) B (B) over bar pairs, collected near the Upsilon(4S) resonance with the Belle detector at the KEKB asymmetric-energy e(+)e(-) collider. The signal events are selected based on the presence of a high momentum muon and the topology of the rest of the event showing properties of a generic B-meson decay, as well as the missing energy and momentum being consistent with the hypothesis of a neutrino from the signal decay. We find a 2.4 standard deviation excess above background including systematic uncertainties, which corresponds to a branching fraction of B(B- -> mu(-)(nu) over bar (mu)) = (6.46 +/- 2.22 +/- 1.60) x 10(-7) or a frequentist 90% confidence level interval on the B- -> mu(-)(nu) over bar (mu) branching fraction of [2.9, 10.7] x 10(-7).
Jian Wang, Matthias Finger, Qian Wang, Yiming Li, João Miguel das Neves Duarte, Matthias Wolf, Varun Sharma, Yi Zhang, Tian Cheng, Yixing Chen, Alexis Kalogeropoulos, Ioannis Papadopoulos, Hua Zhang, Siyuan Wang, Xin Chen, Michele Bianco, Sebastiana Gianì, Sun Hee Kim, Davide Di Croce, Jian Zhao, Rakesh Chawla, Jan Steggemann, Konstantin Androsov, Anna Mascellani, Federica Legger, Matteo Galli, Gabriele Grosso
Volkan Cevher, Kimon Antonakopoulos