Measurement of the B0 Lifetime with Partially Reconstructed B0 --> D*- l+ nu Decays

The B0 lifetime has been measured with a sample of 23 million BBbar pairs collected by the BaBar detector at the PEP-II e+e- storage ring during 1999 and 2000. Events from the semileptonic decay B0 --> D*- l+ nu have been selected with a partial reconstruction method in which only the charged lepton and the slow pion from the D*- --> D0bar pi- decay are reconstructed. The result is tau_B0 = 1.529+/-0.012 (stat) +/- 0.029 (syst) ps.