Improved measurement of theB 0 andB + meson lifetimes

The lifetimes of the B 0 and B + mesons have been measured with the Aleph detector at LEP, using approximately 3 million hadronic Z decays collected in the period 1991 1994. In the first of three methods, semileptonic decays of B 0 and B + mesons were partially reconstructed by identifying events containing a lepton with an associated D*- orbar D^0 meson. The second method used fully reconstructed B 0 and B + mesons. The third method, used to measure the B 0 lifetime, employed a partial reconstruction technique to identify B 0→ D*- π + X decays. The combined results are begin{gathered} tau _0 = 1.55 ± 0.06 ± 0.03 ps, \ tau _ + = 1.58 ± 0.09 ± 0.03 ps, \ tfrac{{tau _ + }}{{tau _0 }} = 1.03 ±…