PT Journal AU ATLAS Collaboration (Aaboud, Mea Alvarez Piqueras, D Bailey, AJ Barranco Navarro, L Cabrera Urban, S Castillo, FL Castillo Gimenez, V Cerda Alberich, L Costa, MJ Escobar, C Estrada Pastor, O Ferrer, A Fiorini, L Fuster, J Garcia, C Garcia Navarro, JE Gonzalez de la Hoz, S Higon-Rodriguez, E Jimenez Pena, J Lacasta, C Lozano Bahilo, JJ Madaffari, D Mamuzic, J Marti-Garcia, S Melini, D Miñano, M Mitsou, VA Pedraza Lopez, S Rodriguez Bosca, S Rodriguez Rodriguez, D Salt, J Soldevila, U Sanchez, J Valero, A Valls Ferrer, JA Vos, M TI Search for lepton-flavor-violating decays of the Z boson into a r lepton and a light lepton with the ATLAS detector SO Physical Review D JI Phys. Rev. D PY 2018 BP 092010 EP 31pp VL 98 IS 9 DI 10.1103/PhysRevD.98.092010 LA English AB Direct searches for lepton flavor violation in decays of the Z boson with the ATLAS detector at the LHC are presented. Decays of the Z boson into an electron or muon and a hadronically decaying r lepton are considered. The searches are based on a data sample of proton-proton collisions collected by the ATLAS detector in 2015 and 2016, corresponding to an integrated luminosity of 36.1 fb(-1) at a center-of-mass energy of root s = 13 TeV. No statistically significant excess of events above the expected background is observed, and upper limits on the branching ratios of lepton-flavor-violating decays are set at the 95% confidence level: B(Z -> e tau) < 5.8 x 10(-5) and B(Z -> μtau) < 2.4 x 10(-5). This is the first limit on B(Z -> e tau) with ATLAS data. The upper limit on 13(Z -> μtau) is combined with a previous ATLAS result based on 20.3 fb(-1) of proton protoncollision data at a center-of-mass energy of root s = 8 TeV and the combined upper limit at 95% confidence level is B(Z -> μtau) < 1.3 x 10(-5). ER