Enhanced Three-Body Decay of the Charged Higgs Boson

Abstract

If the charged Higgs boson H+ exists with mh < mt + mb, the conventional expectation is that it will decay dominantly into c s-bar and tau+ nu-tau. However, the three-body decay mode H+ --> W+ b b-bar is also present and we show that it becomes very important in the low tan(beta) region for mh >~ 140 GeV. We explore its phenomenological implications for the charged-Higgs-boson search in top-quark decay.

Comments: 11 pages, 2 figures, revtex and epsf required