A study of three-prong tau decays with charged kaons

From an analysis of the ionisation energy loss of charged particles selected from a sample of 147926 candidates recorded in the OPAL detector at centre-of-mass energies near the resonance, we determine the branching ratios: where the notation refers to decay modes with or without an accompanying . The final states occurring through are treated as background in this analysis. We also examine the resonant structure of candidates. Under the assumption that the resonant structure is dominated by the K resonances, we determine: In all results, the first uncertainties are statistical and the second are systematic. Received: 9 July 1999 / Published online: 17 February 2000