Phenomenology ofW±H∓production at the CERN Large Hadron Collider

Abstract

Barrientos Bendez\'u and Kniehl recently suggested that ${W}^{\ifmmode\pm\else\textpm\fi{}}{H}^{\ensuremath{\mp}}$ associated production may be a useful channel in the search for the elusive heavy charged Higgs bosons of the 2 Higgs doublet model at the CERN Large Hadron Collider. We investigate the phenomenology of this mechanism in the minimal supersymmetric standard model, with special attention paid to the most likely heavy Higgs boson decay, ${H}^{\ensuremath{\mp}}\ensuremath{\rightarrow}t\stackrel{\ensuremath{\rightarrow}}{b}b\overline{b}{W}^{\ensuremath{\mp}},$ and to the irreducible background from top quark pair production. We find that the semileptonic signature ``$b\overline{b}{W}^{+}{W}^{\ensuremath{-}}\ensuremath{\rightarrow}b\overline{b}jjl+\mathrm{missing}\mathrm{}\mathrm{momentum}$'' is dominated by top-quark--top-antiquark events, which overwhelm the charged Higgs boson signal over the heavy mass range that can be probed at the CERN collider.