Enhanced Four-Body Decays of Charged Higgs Bosons into Off-Shell Pseudoscalar Higgs and $W^\pm$ Boson Pairs in a Lepton-Specific 2-Higgs Doublet Model

Abstract

We study the time-honoured decay $H^\pm\to A W^\pm$ but for the first time, we do so for the case of both $A$ and $W^\pm$ being off-shell, therefore computing a $1\to 4$ body decay. We show that the corresponding decay rate not only extends the reach of $H^\pm$ searches to small masses of the latter but also that the results of our implementation differ significantly from the yield of the $1\to3$ body decay over the phase space region in which the latter is normally used. We show the phenomenological relevance of this implementation in the case of the so-called lepton-specific 2-Higgs Doublet Model (2HDM) over the mass region wherein the aforementioned $1\to 4$ body decay can dominate just beyond the top (anti)quark mass. This mass region is accessible in the lepton-specific 2HDM as the Yukawa couplings are such that limits from $b \to s \gamma$ and $\tau \to \mu \nu_{\tau} \bar{\nu_\mu}$ observables on $M_{H^\pm}$ are rather mild. However, we emphasise that similar effects may occur in other 2HDM types, as the $W^\pm H^\mp A$ vertex is 2HDM type independent.