The Tau Lepton and the Search for the Higgs in CDF

                 Prof. John Conway, Rutgers Univ.

 Many of the great discoveries in high energy physics have relied 
 upon the unique experimental signatures of the charged leptons, the
 electron and muon.  In fact the discovery of the third-generation
 charged lepton, the tau, in 1975, was possible only because of its
 decays to the lighter leptons.  This pattern continued with the
 discoveries of the b quark in 1978, the W and Z bosons, in 1983, and
 the discovery of the top quark at the Tevatron in 1995.  In CDF, the
 ongoing search for the final missing piece of the Standard Model, the
 Higgs boson, depends crucially on leptons, and especially the tau
 lepton, due to its large mass.  In this talk we will examine the 
 development of tau identification techniques and see how they were 
 expoited in the search for charged Higgs decays of the top quark.
 We will also look at the role the tau plays in the searches for the 
 Higgs in the Standard Model and supersymmetric extensions to it, 
 using both present data from CDF and projections of data from the 
 next run with an upgraded detector.