Single and pair production of doubly charged Higgs bosons at hadron colliders

Abstract

Current searches for doubly charged Higgs bosons (H^{\pm\pm}) at the Fermilab Tevatron are sensitive to single production of H^{\pm\pm}, although the pair production mechanism q\bar q\to H^{++}H^{--} is assumed to be dominant. In the context of a Higgs Triplet Model we study the mechanism q'\bar q\to H^{\pm\pm}H^{\mp} at the Tevatron and CERN Large Hadron Collider, and show that its inclusion can significantly improve the search potential for H^{\pm\pm}. Moreover, assuming that the neutrino mass is generated solely by the triplet field Yukawa coupling to leptons, we compare the branching ratios of H^{\pm\pm}\to l^\pm l^\pm and H^{\pm\pm}\to H^\pm W^* for the cases of a normal hierarchical, inverted hierarchical and degenerate neutrino mass spectrum.