Doubly charged scalar decays in a type II seesaw scenario with two Higgs triplets

Abstract

The type II seesaw mechanism for neutrino mass generation usually makes use of one complex scalar triplet. The collider signature of the doubly-charged scalar, the most striking feature of this scenario, consists mostly in decays into same-sign dileptons or same-sign W boson pairs. However, certain scenarios of neutrino mass generation, such as those imposing texture zeros by a symmetry mechanism, require at least two triplets in order to be consistent with the type II seesaw mechanism. We develop a model with two such complex triplets and show that, in such a case, mixing between the triplets can cause the heavier doubly-charged scalar mass eigenstate to decay into a singly-charged scalar and a W boson of the same sign. Considering a large number of benchmark points with different orders of magnitude of the ΔL = 2 Yukawa couplings, chosen in agreement with the observed neutrino mass and mixing pattern, we demonstrate that H⁺⁺₁→H⁺₂ W⁺ can have more than 99 % branching fraction in the cases where the vacuum expectation values of the triplets are small. It is also shown that the above decay allows one to differentiate a two-triplet case at the LHC, through the ratios of events in various multi-lepton channels.