A search for baryon-number-violating decays of the $\Lambda$ using CLAS at JLab

We present the status of a search for baryon-number-violating decays of the $\Lambda$ baryon using data from the CLAS detector for photoproducton off of the proton in liquid hydrogen. The dataset contains roughly $3.0\times10^6$ $\Lambda$ production events that are reconstructable from three charged final-state tracks (recoil $K^+$ and decay products). We investigate nine potential decay modes in which the $\Lambda$ decays to a meson-lepton pair. We perform a blind analysis during the optimization of data selection criteria. We estimate that the analysis will be sensitive to branching fractions on the order of $\Gamma_{\textrm{BNV}}/\Gamma_{\textrm{tot}} \approx 6\times 10^{-5}$, roughly an order of magnitude smaller than those of the currently known rare $\Lambda$ decays.