Searching for an elusive charged Higgs boson at the Large Hadron Collider

Abstract

We study the signals for a “fermiophobic” charged Higgs boson present in an extension of the standard model with an additional Higgs doublet and right-handed neutrinos, responsible for generating Dirac-type neutrino masses. We study the pair production of the charged Higgs at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC), which can be relatively light and still allowed by experimental data. The charged Higgs decays dominantly into a W boson and a very light neutral scalar present in the model, which decays invisibly and passes undetected. We find that the signal for such a charged Higgs is overwhelmed by the standard model background and will prove elusive at the 8 TeV run of the LHC. We present a cut-flow based analysis to pinpoint a search strategy at the 14 TeV run of the LHC which can achieve a signal significance of 5σ for a given mass range of the charged Higgs.