A flavour-independent Higgs boson search in e+e− collisions at s up to 209 GeV

A search for the Higgsstrahlung process e+e- -> HZ is carried out, covering decays of the Higgs boson into any quark pair, a gluon pair or a tau pair. The analysis is based on the 630pb-1 of data collected by the ALEPH detector at LEP at centre-of-mass energies from 189 to 209GeV. A 95% C.L. lower mass limit of 109.1GeV/c2 is obtained for a Higgs boson cross section equal to that expected from the Standard Model if the Higgs boson decays exclusively into hadrons and/or taus, irrespective of the relative branching fractions.