Search for doubly charged Higgs bosons using the same-sign diboson mode at the LHC

Abstract

Doubly charged Higgs bosons are predicted in many new physics models with an extended Higgs sector that contains a Higgs triplet field. Current experimental searches have been focusing mainly on the scenario in which the same-sign dilepton decay modes are the dominant ones. We study the scenario where the vacuum expectation value of the triplet field is sufficiently large so that the associated charged Higgs bosons decay dominantly to a pair of weak gauge bosons instead. A detailed simulation of the signal and the backgrounds is performed for the CERN Large Hadron Collider at the collision energy of 8 TeV and 14 TeV. We find that different cuts should be imposed for the events, depending on whether the doubly charged Higgs boson mass is greater than about 200 GeV. In the higher mass region, the forward jet tagging proves to be useful in enhancing the signal significance. We show the discovery reach of the LHC running at 8 and 14 TeV, with two benchmark triplet vacuum expectation values. With an integrated luminosity of 10 fb${}^{-1}$ at 8 TeV, the doubly charged Higgs boson with a mass of $\sim 180$ GeV can be tested at $5\sigma$ level in such a scenario.

Comments: 18 pages, 10 figures; published in Physical Review D