Charged Higgs boson pairs at the CERN LHC

Abstract

We compute the cross section for pair production of charged Higgs bosons at the LHC and compare the three production mechanisms. The bottom-parton scattering process is computed to next-to-leading order (NLO), and the validity of the bottom-parton approach is established in detail. The light-flavor Drell-Yan cross section is evaluated at NLO as well. The gluon-fusion process through a one-loop amplitude is then compared with these two results. We show how a complete sample of events could look, in terms of total cross sections and distributions of the heavy final states.