Detecting Heavy Charged Higgs Bosons at the LHC with Four b-Quark Tags

Abstract

We investigate the signature of a heavy charged Higgs boson of the Minimal Supersymmetric Standard Model in the lepton plus multi-jet channel at the Large Hadron Collider with four $b$-tags. The signal is the gluon-gluon fusion process $gg\to t\bar{b}{H}^{-}$, followed by the $H^{-}\to \bar{t}b$ decay, while the main background is from $gg\to t\bar{t}b\bar{b}$. We find that the two can be separated effectively by kinematic cuts and mass reconstruction, but the signal size is not very large in the end. Nonetheless, with a good $b$-tagging efficiency, ${ϵ}_b\sim 50$, this channel can provide a viable signature over a limited but interesting range of the parameter space.

Comments: 24 pages, latex, uses axodraw and epsfig, 4 figures (version to be published in Phys. Rev. D: significant changes including better results following a bug fix)