Pair production of charged Higgs bosonsin association with bottom quark pairs at the Large Hadron Collider

Abstract

We study the process $gg\to b\bar b H^ + H^-$ at large $\tan\beta$ , where it represents the dominant production mode of charged Higgs boson pairs in a Type II 2-Higgs doublet model, including the minimal supersymmetric standard model. The ability to select this signal would in principle enable the measurements of some triple-Higgs couplings, which in turn would help understanding the structure of the extended Higgs sector. We outline a selection procedure that should aid in disentangling the Higgs signal from the main irreducible background. This exploits a signature made up by “four b-quark jets, two light-quark jets, a $\tau$ -lepton and missing energy”. While, for $\tan\beta\gtrsim30$ and over a significant $M_{H^\pm}$ range above the top mass, a small signal emerges already at the Large Hadron Collider after 100 fb-1, ten times as much luminosity would be needed to perform accurate measurements of Higgs parameters in the above final state, rendering this channel a primary candidate to benefit from the so-called “Super” Large Hadron Collider option, for which a tenfold increase in instantaneous luminosity is currently being considered.