Enhanced Charged Higgs Signal at the LHC

Abstract

We investigate the discovery prospects of a charged Higgs boson ($H^\pm$) at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) via the process $cg\to bH^\pm \to bc\bar{b}$ within the framework of a general two Higgs doublet model (G2HDM). In most two Higgs doublet models, the $H^+ cb$ coupling ($g_{H^+cb}$) is usually suppressed by the CKM matrix element $V_{cb}$. In G2HDM, there are additional Yukawa couplings, the process $cg\to bH^\pm \to bc\bar{b}$ is enhanced by the coupling $g_{H^+cb} \simeq \rtc V_{tb}$ in both the production and decay of the charged Higgs boson. We study possible physics backgrounds and evaluate the discovery potential with realistic acceptance cuts and tagging efficiencies at collider energies of $\sqrt{s}=$13 and 14 TeV. We apply $b$-tagging and $c$-tagging and show that $m_{H^+}$ can be extracted by pairing the tagged $b$ and $c$-jets. Our analysis leads to promising results for the current LHC and expected high-luminosity LHC.