Search for doubly charged Higgs bosons at LEP2

A search for pair-produced doubly charged Higgs bosons has been performed using the data collected by the DELPHI detector at LEP at centre-of-mass energies between 189 and 209 GeV. No excess is observed in the data with respect to the Standard Model background. A lower limit for the mass of 97.3 GeV/c(2) at the 95% confidence level has been set for doubly charged Higgs bosons in left-right symmetric models for any value of the Yukawa coupling between the Higgs bosons and the tau leptons. (C) 2002 Published by Elsevier Science B.V.