Detecting heavy charged Higgs bosons at the LHC with four b-quark tags

Abstract

We investigate the signature of a heavy charged Higgs boson of the minimal super-symmetric standard model in the lepton plus multi-jet channel at the Large Hadron Collider with four b-tags. The signal is the gluon-gluon fusion process gg → tb̅ H^-, followed by the H^- → t̅b decay, while the main background is from gg → tt̅bb̅. We find that the two can be separated effectively by kinematic cuts and mass reconstruction, but the signal size is not very large in the end. Nonetheless, with a good b-tagging efficiency, ε_b ~ 50%, this channel can provide a viable signature over a limited but interesting range of the parameter space.