Search for Lepton-Flavor-Violating tau Decays into a Lepton and an f0(980) Meson

We search for lepton-flavor-violating tau decays into a lepton (electron or muon) and an f0(980) meson using 671 fb-1 of data collected with the Belle detector at the KEKB asymmetric-energy e+e- collider. No events are observed and we set the following 90% C.L. upper limits on the branching fraction products: B(tau- -> e-f0(980))*B(f0(980)->pi+pi-)<3.2x10^-8 and B(tau- -> mu-f0(980))*B(f0(980) -> pi+pi-)<3.4x10^-8. This is the first search performed for these modes.