Detecting heavy charged Higgs bosons at the LHC with triple b-tagging

Abstract

We investigate the charged Higgs boson signal at the LHC using its dominant production and decay modes with triple b-tagging, i.e. tH⁻ → tt̅b → bb̅bW⁺W₋ , followed by leptonic decay of one W and hadronic decay of the other. We consider the continuum background from the associated production of tt̅ with a b- or a light quark or gluon jet, which can be mis-tagged as b-jet. We reconstruct the top quark masses to identify the 3rd b- jet accompanying the tt̅, and use its p_T distribution to distinguish the signal from the background. Combining this with the reconstruction of the H^± mass gives a viable signature over two interesting regions of the parameter space- i.e. tanβ ~ 1 and ~ m_t/m_b.