Search for neutral Higgs bosons decaying into four taus at lep2

A search for the production and non-standard decay of a Higgs boson, h, into four taus through intermediate pseudoscalars, a, is conducted on 683 pb -1 of data collected by the ALEPH experiment at centre-of-mass energies from 183 to 209 GeV No excess of events above background is observed, and exclusion limits are placed on the combined production cross section times branching ratio, β 2 = σ(e +e -→Zh)/σ SM(e +e -→Zh) ×B(h→aa)×B(a→τ +τ -) 2 For m h < 107 GeV/c 2 and 4 < m a < 10 GeV/c 2, β 2 > 1 is excluded at the 95% confidence level