Search for Lepton Flavor Violating Decays of the Higgs Boson

We present the first direct search for lepton flavor violating (LFV) decays of the Higgs boson at CMS. LFV decays are permitted in many extensions of the standard model. Indirect constraints strongly limit branching ratios of the decay $H \to e \mu$, but allow $H \to e \tau$ and $H \to \mu \tau$ up to 10\%. We present results in all three channels using the full run 1 data set collected by the CMS experiment at the LHC.